Celebration time. Some Palestinian prisoners have been released. A mother reunited with her daughter. A young mother reunited with her babies.
Still in prison are people who never received a fair trial, people that independent inquirers say are wrongly imprisoned. Still in prison kids who cursed soldiers who walked into their villages wielding guns.
Still imprisoned far too many Palestinians who threw stones against bullets. Still imprisoned thousands of Palestinian hostages.
Many of us never knew how many hostages had been stolen, hauled into jails by Israel before 7 October 2023. We only heard the one-sided story of that day. The day when an offence force on a border was taken by surprise and when it panicked and blasted and bombed.
When that army guarding the occupation did more to lose lives than save lives.
Many never knew and perhaps never will know how many of the Palestinians who were kidnapped before and after that day had been beaten and tortured, including with the torture of rape.
We do know many have been murdered. We do know that some released from prison died soon after. We do not know how many more Palestinians will be taken hostage and imprisoned behind the prison no reporter is allowed to photograph.
Israelis boast over prison crime
The only clue to what happens inside is that Israelis have boasted this crime on national television. The clue is that Israeli soldiers have been tried for raping their own colleagues.
Make no mistake, this is a mean misogynist mercantile army. No sensible rational caring person would wish to serve in it.
No mother on any side of this conflict should lose her child. No father should bury his daughter or son. No grandparent should grieve over the loss of a life that should outlive them.
The crimes need to be exposed. All of them. Our media filters the truth. It does not provide a fair or full story. If you want that switch for pity’s sake go to Al Jazeera English.
The Palestinian people were forced to flee their homes in Gaza. Those who were never responsible for any crime were bombed out of their homes, they fled as their families were murdered, burned to death, shot by snipers. They fled while soldiers mocked their dead children.
They return home to ashes. If we want peace we must face the truths that create conflict. We are all connected in peace and war and peace.
Peace is the strongest greeting. It sears the heart and soars the soul.
It can only be achieved when we recognise and stop the anguish that causes oppression.
Saige England is a freelance journalist and author living in the Aotearoa New Zealand city of Ōtautahi.
COMMENTARY:By Steven Cowan, editor of Against The Current
New Zealand’s One News interviewed a Gaza journalist last week who has called out the Western media for its complicity in genocide.
For some 15 months, the Western media have framed Israel’s genocidal rampage in Gaza as a “legitimate” war.
Pretending to provide an objective and impartial view of “the Gaza War”, the Western media has failed to report on the atrocities that the Israel has committed in Gaza. The true face of Israel’s genocidal assault has been hidden behind the Western media’s determination to sanitise genocide.
Palestinian journalist Abubaker Abed’s appeal to the world and the Western media. Video: Dawn News
Even the deliberate targeting of journalists by the Israeli “Defence” Force (IDF), a war crime, has not moved the Western media to take action. More than 200 journalists have been killed in Gaza and the Western media has remained silent.
The New Zealand and Pacific media also have nothing to be proud of in their coverage of events in Gaza. They, too, have consistently framed Israel’s genocidal rampage as a legitimate war and swept Israel’s war crimes under the carpet.
Some news outlets, like NZ’s Newstalk ZB, have gone as far as to defend Israel’s actions.
With the announcement of a ceasefire in Gaza last week, One News, for the first time since Israel began its murderous assault, chose to talk live to a Palestinian journalist in Gaza. That journalist was 22-year-old Abubaker Abed.
Ignored by Western media
While One News introduced him as a reporter for the Associated Press, most of Abed’s reports have been for Palestinian news outlets like The Electronic Intifida.
On January 11, Abed made a speech condemning the Western media’s complicity in genocide. While the speech has been widely circulated in the social media, it has been ignored by the Western media.
In New Zealand, the important speech has failed to make it to the One News website.
One News interviewing Gaza journalist Abubaker Abed who has called out the Western media for its complicity in genocide.
This article was first published on Steven Cowan’s website Against The Current. Republished with permission.
A litmus test of Israel’s commitment to abandon genocide and start down the road towards lasting peace is whether they choose to release the most important of all the hostages, Marwan Barghouti.
During the past 22 years in Israeli prisons he has been beaten, tortured, sexually molested and had limbs broken.
What hasn’t been broken is the spirit of the greatest living Palestinian — a symbol of his people’s “legendary steadfastness” and determination to win freedom from occupation and resist the genocidal forces of the US, Israel and their Western enablers like Australia and New Zealand.
As reported last week, Egypt, Qatar and Hamas are all insisting Barghouti, the most popular leader in Palestine, be among the thousands of Palestinian hostages to be freed as part of the ceasefire agreement.
His release or retention in captivity will say volumes about which path the US and Israel wish to take: either more land thieving, more killings, more lawlessness or steps towards ending the occupation and choosing peace over territorial expansion.
Why is Barghouti potentially so important? Despite long years in Israeli jails, he is a political giant who bestrides the Palestinian cause. He is an intellectual and both a fighter and a peace activist.
He is respected by all factions of the Palestinians. He is by far the most popular figure in Palestine and as such he is almost uniquely positioned to complete the vital task of uniting his people.
Back in July last year the Chinese government pulled off a diplomatic masterstroke by getting 14 factions, including Hamas and Fatah, to successfully come together for reconciliation talks and ink the Beijing Declaration on Ending Division and Strengthening Palestinian National Unity. Now they need a unifying leader to move forward together.
Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas is despised as a US-Israeli tool by most Palestinians, 90 percent of whom, according to polling, want him gone. Hamas has represented the most effective resistance to Israel but the time may have come for them to accept partnership with, even leadership by, someone who can negotiate peace.
How Gaza and the West Bank is governed should be determined by the Palestinian people not by anyone else, especially not by Israeli leaders currently under investigation for genocide or US leaders who should join them in the dock for arming them.
Hypocritical rejection of Hamas
Barghouti, however, could untie the Gordian knot that has formed around the West’s hypocritical rejection of Hamas on one hand and the Palestinian people’s determination not to be dictated to by their oppressors on the other.
Barghouti may also be a saviour for the Israelis. Their society has turned into a psychotic perversion of the great hope Jews around the world placed in the Israeli state.
Israel is now the greatest killer of journalists in the history of war, the remorseless destroyer of hospitals and their patients and staff, the desecrator of countless churches and mosques. Tens of thousands of women have been killed for the sake of killing.
Israel is guilty of the crime of crimes — genocide — and needs a way out of the mess it has created.
For all these reasons Marwan Barghouti is a very dangerous man to Netanyahu and the most fanatical Zionists. He believes in peace.
In my profile of him a year ago I quoted his wife, lawyer and activist Fadwa Barghouti: “Marwan’s goal has always been ending the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories. Marwan Barghouti believes in politics. He’s a political and national leader loved by his people.
‘Fought for peace’ “He fought for peace with bravery and spent time on the Palestinian street advocating for peace. But he also believes in international law, which gives the occupied people the right to fight for their independence and freedom.”
Alon Liel, formerly Israel’s most senior diplomat, proposed freeing Barghouti because he is “the ultimate leader of the Palestinian people,” and “he is the only one who can extricate us from the quagmire we are in.”
Marwan Barghouti has the moral, political and popular stature to reach out to the Israelis, to see past their crimes and to sit down with them. If only. If only. If only.
The horrible reality is Israel and the US have been led by war criminals who fail to grasp the fact that peace is only possible if they abandon the vilification of the Palestinian people and their leaders; that a better world is only possible if the Palestinians are finally given freedom and dignity.
It will be a relief to everyone to see the remaining few dozen Israelis held by Hamas and other groups released. They deserve to be home with their families.
It will be a relief that thousands of Palestinian hostages be freed, many of them, according to Israel’s leading human rights organisation B’tselem, victims of torture, sexual violence and medieval conditions. Hundreds of Palestinian child hostages — all of them traumatised — will be returned to their families.
All these are welcome developments. Strategically, however, Marwan Barghouti stands apart.
Palestinian Marwan Barghouti . . . a symbol of his people’s “legendary steadfastness” and determination to win freedom from occupation and resist the genocidal forces of the US, Israel and their Western enablers like Australia and New Zealand. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz/
Uniquely suited to lead Palestine
Long considered the “Palestinian Mandela” — not least because of his 22-years continuous imprisonment — the former Fatah leader, the former military leader, has attributes that make him almost uniquely suited to lead Palestine to freedom — if Israel and the US are prepared to abandon the Greater Israel project and accept peace can only come with justice for all.
He has lived for more than 22 years in conditions far more barbaric than the great South African leader had to endure on Robben Island. According to Israeli human rights groups, family and international lawyers, Barghouti has been beaten, tortured, sexually molested and had limbs broken.
What hasn’t been broken is the spirit of the greatest living Palestinian – a symbol of his people’s “legendary steadfastness” and determination to win freedom from occupation and resistance to the genocidal forces of the US, Israel and their Western enablers like Australia and New Zealand.
Marwan Barghouti is the same age as me — 65 — and it fills me with horror that a man who has spent decades fighting for freedom, and, if possible, peace, has been subjected to the horrors of an Israeli gulag for so long.
I am not sure I would have had the physical or mental strength to endure what he has but — like Mandela — he kept his humanity and has remained an advocate for peace.
We should never forget that seven million Palestinians remain as hostages held in brutal conditions by the US and Israel. Most are hostages without human rights, political rights, territorial rights.
As Palestinians have pointed out: imprisonment is now part of Palestinian consciousness. But — as Marwan Barghouti has shown with his iron will, his human decency, his determination to continue to be an advocate for peace with Israel — you can imprison the Palestinians but not their struggle.
I’ll give the last word to his son, Arab Barghouti who told Mehdi Hasan on Zeteo this week, “My father used to always tell me that hope is sometimes a privilege, but being ‘hope-less’ is a privilege that we can’t have as Palestinians.”
In the same interview he also said:
“If any Israeli leader really wants an end to this and to have peace for the region, they would see that my father is someone that would bring that and is someone who still believes in the tiny chance left for the two-state solution.”
Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz
A temporary security fence seen near the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., ahead of the presidential inauguration on Jan. 13, 2025.Photo: Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images
This time eight years ago, I was in Washington to protest the inauguration of President Donald Trump. I had no plans to attend the vast Women’s March scheduled for the following day; this was no time, I thought, for a defanged liberal feminism, for kitschy pink accoutrements and pussy puns.
I was there to take partin J20 — January 20 — the antifascist black bloc protest. We aimed to inaugurate Trump’s presidency with disruptive antagonism in the streets. Non-specific calls to “shut it down” carried a renewed sense of urgency then, in the wake of Trump’s 2016 election victory and the threat of ascendant fascist rule.
Shut it down, we did not. The protest wrought minor property damage, primarily against bank and chain-store windows.
Hours before Trump was sworn in, delivering his sinister vision of “American carnage” on the inaugural stage, our march was overwhelmed by riot police. Over 200 protesters were detained and most arrestees went on to facefelony charges carrying a potential decade-plus in prison — charges that were eventually dropped, but only after 18 agonizing months for the defendants.
I am not in D.C. None of the anti-fascist, leftist crowds I know of are there either.
Eight years later, the start of a second Trump term augurs an authoritarianism more studied and honed. I am not in D.C. None of the anti-fascist, leftist crowds I know of, who convened en masse in the city for J20 in 2017, are there. There is no plan for a giant carnival of #resistance, à la the Women’s March, either.
While the severe cold, which has forced Trump’s ceremony inside, could be blamed, the weather did not stymie mass protest plans – no plans anything close to the scale of 2017 were made.
D.C. authorities have said that there are no known threats to the inauguration, and permitted protests are predicted to be far smaller this time around. The entirety of the D.C. police force will nonetheless be on duty, joined by a reported 4,000 cops from other areas and 7,800 National Guard troops.
I won’t foreclose surprise — Luigi Mangione reminds us not to — but it’s likely that, even indoors, the inauguration will be a dreadful, expensive spectacle, drenched in fascist rhetoric and aesthetics, performed without disruption or notable protest.
The quiet is not necessarily a bad thing. There is little point in going to Washington today to register opposition to Trump’s return. Trumpism never left. No one in the halls of power in Washington is listening. And, above all, the terrain on which we fight Trumpist rule is the rough ground of everyday life. It’s where we’re already standing.
Democrats’ Empty Rhetoric
The absence of significant counter-demonstrations could be seen to signal a fatalism or acquiescence on behalf of Trump’s opponents — and, for liberal centrists and conservative “never Trumpers,” it may well be.
For left-wing movements, however, back-footed as we might be, skipping inauguration protests this year evinces a sober reckoning with the limits of certain tactics in certain moments, and, at best, a keener focus on where energies will be needed for the struggles ahead.
The last eight years, but particularly the second half of Biden’s presidency, proved what many on the left had feared: Liberal Democrats’ antifascist rhetoric was hollow.
The outraged voices of the #resistance to Trump 1.0 have spent the last years pushing Trump-worthy anti-immigration policies, throwing trans people under the bus, backing Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, fear-mongering over crime rates, and pouring funds into police budgets rather than meeting people’s needs.
Democrats licensed the very Trumpian politics they had vowed to #resist.
They licensed the very Trumpian politics they had vowed to #resist. Whether Democrats’ rightward appeals were ill-conceived electoral strategies or signs of ideological alignment with Trump is irrelevant; the violent political work done is the same either way.
Democratic Party subservience to Trump’s second-term agenda started early, with 48 House Democrats voting alongside Republicans to pass the Laken Riley Act last week.
The bill would allow immigration officials to indefinitely detain and potentially deport unauthorized immigrants accused — not even convicted — of minor crimes like shoplifting. And it would let the most Trumpist forces in American politics choose who to deport.
The Front-Line Work
At this point, it is hardly news that we cannot rely on centrist liberals to form an antifascist front. I say this with no joy: Democratic mayors and governors, from New York to Atlanta, have all but signaled that they will offer no institutional protections for communities most vulnerable to Trump’s violent agenda. The left is small and disarticulated. The challenges we face are enormous and growing.
We find ourselves in a grimly defensive position. The task is urgent to build resilient communities, including rapid-response networks to defend neighbors and colleagues from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, or ensuring the wide circulation and accessibility of abortion pills and hormones.
Front-line communities have been doing this work — and long before Trump’s initial rise to power too.
Lest anyone forget, the pre-Trump years were no panacea for abortion access, immigrant rights, or health care, especially gender-affirming health care. Fossil fuel capitalism, austerity, brutal inequalities, and worker exploitation, racist policing, and the carceral state — these were the conditions of disaffection in which the far-right could thrive.
Now, if Trump delivers even a fragment of the authoritarian promises he has made, all these violences will intensify, as will the penalties for fighting them. Things can just get worse. It is a sign of seriousness that many organizers are focusing on community building and various defense strategies, rather than spectacular protests.
Learning as We Go
The time to be in the streets, or for other disruptive public actions, has hardly passed.
The enormous George Floyd uprisings of 2020 were not a mistake or a failure by virtue of facing repression and backlash. They were a potent, necessary articulation of a liberation politics fighting to be realized. The same can be said for the extraordinary student-led movement for Palestinian freedom, which has faced bipartisan demonization, and which will need to continue long after any Gaza ceasefire.
These are long, embattled struggles, with protests only featuring as the most visible facet.
Such visibility is not negligible; we will need to find each other in the streets and intersections again. Actions like the mass swarms at airports against Trump’s “Muslim ban” should have also continued against Biden’s harsh border rule, and will be far more crucial going forward than any counter-inauguration protest spectacle.
The 2017 Women’s March was a lie, even if its organizers and attendees were acting in earnest. It suggested a united liberal-to-left feminist, antifascist front that simply did not exist. Mainstream Democrats have made that all too clear.
J20, meanwhile, was a miscalculation; we did not have the capacity to interfere meaningfully with the inauguration and its huge policing apparatus. Militant protest is always risky, but risks should be as well calculated as possible. A relative quiet today for Trump’s inauguration in D.C. is, I hope, a sign of learning.
Coalition talks, already underway, are set to be complicated because in the last Parliament at least two parties had MPs split across both the government and opposition benches.
Ballot boxes from all around the country have been transported back to Port Vila where the Vanuatu Electoral Commission is conducting the official count.
Others said they were sick of political instability.
Last week’s snap election was triggered by a premature dissolution of Parliament last year — the second consecutive time President Nike Vurobaravu has acted on a council of ministers’ request to dissolve the House in the face of a leadership challenge.
Counting the latest election Vanuatu will have had five prime ministers in five years.
The only polling station, set up in the capital Nouméa near the Vanuatu Consulate-General, counted as part as the Vanuatu capital Port Vila’s constituency.
It was open to voters last Thursday from 7:30am to 8pm.
For New Caledonia, the estimated number of ni-Vanuatu registered voters is about 1600.
Bus shuttles were also organised for ni-Vanuatu voters residing in the Greater Nouméa area (Mont-Dore, Dumbéa and Païta).
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
“A state party cannot escape its human rights responsibility when outsourcing asylum processing to another state,” committee member Mahjoub El Haiba said.
After the decisions were released, a spokesperson for the Australian Home Affairs Department said “it has been the Australian government’s consistent position that Australia does not exercise effective control over regional processing centres”.
“Transferees who are outside of Australia’s territory or its effective control do not engage Australia’s international obligations.
“Nauru as a sovereign state continues to exercise jurisdiction over the regional processing arrangements (and individuals subject to those arrangements) within their territory, to be managed and administered in accordance with their domestic law and international human rights obligations.”
Australia rejected allegations
Canberra opposed the allegations put to the committee, saying there was no prima facie substantiation that the alleged violations in Nauru had occurred within Australia’s jurisdiction.
The committee disagreed.
“It was established that Australia had significant control and influence over the regional processing facility in Nauru, and thus, we consider that the asylum seekers in those cases were within the state party’s jurisdiction under the ICCPR (International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights),” El Haiba said.
“Offshore detention facilities are not human-rights free zones for the state party, which remains bound by the provisions of the Covenant.”
Refugee Action Coalition spokesperson Ian Rintoul said this was one of many decisions from the committee that Australia had ignored, and the UN committee lacked the authority to enforce its findings.
Detainees from both cases claimed Australia had violated its obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), particularly Article 9 regarding arbitrary detention.
The first case involved 24 unaccompanied minors intercepted at sea, who were detained on Christmas Island before being sent to Nauru in 2014.
High temperatures and humidity
On Nauru they faced high temperatures and humidity, a lack of water and sanitation and inadequate healthcare.
Despite all but one being granted refugee status that year, they remained detained on the island.
In the second case an Iranian asylum seeker and her extended family arrived by boat on Christmas Island without valid visas.
Although she was recognised as a refugee by the authorities in Nauru in 2017 she was transferred to mainland Australia for medical reasons but remains detained.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Some of the Palestine Action activists from the so-called Filton 18 appeared at the Old Bailey on Friday 17 January over an action at a weapons factory that supplies genocidal Israel. Of course, they entered not guilty to the charges the state was brining against them – and they also received huge support from crowds waiting outside.
The Filton 18: ‘not guilty’ say supporters and the activists
In a hearing at the Old Bailey, nine of the ‘Filton 18’ political prisoners have entered ‘not guilty’ pleas on all charges put before them, while supporters amassed in solidarity outside of the court. They were called to court to plea to charges after an action in August 2024 at the Filton, Bristol site of Israel’s largest weapons company Elbit Systems.
Outside of the hearing, supporters of the Palestine Action activists gathered outside in solidarity:
Protesters stand outside the Old Bailey demanding justice for the Filton 18. Eighteen activists are currently being held on remand following a Palestine Action action at Elbit System’s Filton facility in Bristol in August 2024. The activists were arrested under the Terrorism Act that allowed the police special measures including keeping those arrested to be held in solitary confinement for up to a week. Their charges are not terrorist related and they have been accused of causing over £1million in damages when they smashed in to the Elbit Systems facility and brought the factory to a standstill.
Palestinian flags were waved:
While people rallied:
Predictably, the Met Police were in attendance:
Supporters waved off members of the Filton 18 as they left the hearing:
All 18 face charges of aggravated burglary, criminal damage, with some of the 18 additionally facing charges of violent disorder. Six activists were arrested on site for an action that saw them breach the site using a modified van, before dismantling weapons of genocide inside, including ‘quadcopter’ drone models.
12 further people were later arrested and remanded to prison for their alleged involvement. Police have justified their continued detention by alleging that their actions have a ‘terrorism connection’.
The rest of the 18 are expected to enter not guilty pleas later this year.
A spokesperson for Palestine Action said:
We refuse to bow to this continued police intimidation and harassment. It is Elbit, Israel’s largest weapons company, that is the guilty party: those resisting the UK’s complicity in genocide are not.
Palestine Action: outrageous abuse of powers by police and CPS
The activists have been returned to prison by the judge and are currently awaiting appeal hearings for bail which have been thus-far rejected. Of the 18, 10 have spent over five months in prison since August, with an additional eight detained since November.
At the hearing, the judge confirmed that their case shall be seen with the 18 split across three trial dates, the first taking place in November 2025, the second in May 2026 and the final date is currently unknown.
An additional date is yet to be set in March of this year, when the defence will seek to challenge and dismiss the application of a “terror connection” in this case.
Amnesty International has stated that the Filton 18 case demonstrates “terrorism powers being misused” to “circumvent normal legal protections, such as justifying holding people in excessively-lengthy pre-charge detention”.
The #Filton18 political prisoners have been subjected to arbitrary and repressive treatment while inside prison – including the withholding of phone calls and mail, prohibitions on communicating with other prisoners, and denials of religious practices and medical privacy.
Featured image and additional images via Martin Pope
Samoa’s prime minister and the five other ousted members of the ruling FAST Party are reportedly challenging their removal.
FAST chair La’auli Leuatea Schmidt on Wednesday announced the removal of the prime minister and five Cabinet ministers from the ruling party.
Twenty party members signed for the removal of Fiame Naomi Mata’afa and five others, including Deputy Prime Minister Tuala Iosefo Ponifasio and two original members.
Samoa media outlets have been reporting that in a letter dated January 17, one of the removed members, Faualo Harry Schuster, wrote: “We all reject the letter of termination as relayed as unlawful and unconstitutional.”
In the letter, which is circulating on social media, he claimed they were still members of the FAST party.
Local media reports had suggested members of the FAST party had called for Fiame’s removal as prime minister.
Meanwhile, the government’s Savali newspaper has confirmed the removal of 13 associate ministers of Fiame’s Cabinet.
“The termination of their appointments stem from the issue of confidence in the Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mata’afa to continue work with the associate ministers, as well as the associate ministers’ expression of no confidence in her leadership,” it said.
“The official statement emphasises that the functions and responsibilities of the Executive Arm of Government continues under the leadership of the Prime Minister — Fiame Naomi Mata’afa and Cabinet.”
An asylum-seeking boy from Central America runs down a hallway after arriving from an immigration detention center to a shelter in San Diego, on Dec. 11, 2018.
I don’t really know what happened to me in 2018 or how it really affected me. I was 10 then, when I was separated from my mother at the border.
We had just come to the U.S from Honduras. We’d stepped into Texas, turned ourselves in to Border Patrol agents, and asked them for help. Instead, I was taken from my mother a few hours later.
I later found out that she was put on trial for crossing illegally and locked up with a lot of other immigrants. I was put on a plane and flown to someplace I didn’t know. My mother didn’t know either. We were separated for over two months.
The experience was formative — and traumatic.
I’ve been thinking lately that trauma can make you forget. But it seems it can also make you remember, not always in good ways.
Trauma can make you forget. But it seems it can also make you remember.
The memory of my own agonizing journey has come flooding back since Donald Trump’s reelection. Trump’s loss in 2020 had brought some relief. Joe Biden became president, and his Justice Department settled a lawsuit that the American Civil Liberties Union had brought over the family separation policy — or, to be more honest, the systematic practice of tearing thousands of parents and children away from each other.
My mother and I were part of the ACLU suit. The legal relief we’ve gotten has included government-funded psychotherapy, as well as a special, renewable immigration status called “parole.” Parole hasn’t made us permanent residents. But it has opened the door for us to stay in the U.S. We also have an asylum case in immigration court. If we win, we can eventually get American citizenship.
Until recently, this stability took an edge off the wounds of separation; it put the bad memories on the back burner. Now the edge is back. I don’t know what will happen next.
A year ago, Trump defended his 2018 family separation policy during an interview with Univision. Separation had stopped people from coming to the U.S. “by the hundreds of thousands,” he claimed.
Since then, he’s also suggested that he could cancel the lawsuit settlement or slow its implementation. His Justice Department could also tell immigration judges they can’t consider domestic violence against women as a reason to grant asylum. Trump did this when he was president the first time around.
The ACLU and other groups say they it will fight any such moves, but my mom worries constantly.
As for me, my therapist and I are doing a lot of talking about my memories.
In Honduras, before we came north, I was a quiet little kid, but still had lots of friends. And I was very close to my mother. When I was 9, she had a partner who was violent. One night, I woke up to the sound of them arguing in the kitchen. A moment later, I heard a loud thud. The next morning I saw a long scratch on the fridge and a machete on the ground nearby.
My mother didn’t say anything — I think she didn’t want to worry me — but I could tell she was afraid that next time he would kill her. I know now that this is why we left Honduras: to save her life.
During our weekslong trip to the U.S., my mother seemed frightened. But since I was so young, the journey started out being fun for me in many ways.
From Guatemala, we crossed the river late at night into Mexico on a speedboat. My mother worried that I’d fall in the water, but I was only thinking about the refreshing breeze after the tropical daytime heat. And I enjoyed myself even when we first got to Texas and were put in a fenced-in room with other people.
Many kids my age were detained there. We were given foil blankets, all silvery and shiny. We played fairy tale games with them. One girl put the foil on her head to make a crown, like a queen. I made a cape around my shoulders and was a witch, trying to snatch the queen’s crown without getting caught by her protector kids.
Then, suddenly, the fun came to a screeching halt. I was led away from my mom into another room. Someone in there mentioned that they were going to be deported. I started crying, went up to a guard, and asked if my mom and I were going to be deported too. He wouldn’t look at me. He just gave me some snacks: an apple and a package of cheese crackers with peanut butter in them.
I would cry myself to sleep longing for my mother.
Outside, the night was enveloped by a thick darkness. I didn’t know whether it was early in the morning or late at night. I was put in a car with a woman who spoke only English and taken to a home. She gestured at me to take a shower and to leave my clothes outside. When I came out, my clothes were gone, including my pants with my two bills of Honduran lempira, the currency from home that I always carried as a good luck charm. The clothes I was given were many sizes too large, so baggy as to be uncomfortable.
Adults I didn’t know, many of whom didn’t speak my language, kept directing my movements, this time into yet another car. I wondered where we were going, but I was told nothing.
I desperately hoped we were going back for my mother. We arrived at an airport, and I yearned to find her on the plane, but she wasn’t there.
No one gave me any more information, and I sobbed in desperation. A 15-year-old girl sitting next to me, the only one who spoke Spanish to me, was in the same situation. She held my hand throughout the flight. After we landed, I never saw her again.
I later found out the place I ended up in was in Virginia. It was a shelter for teenage girls, including a 16-year-old who was pregnant. They didn’t have clothes for girls my age. An 11-year-old girl from Guatemala was my only peer. She seemed nervous and hardly talked.
When night fell, I would cry myself to sleep longing for my mother. I wondered how she was doing, in a country she barely knew, separated from her family — separated from me.
I didn’t speak much to the others, but a girl named Jimena mothered me, comforting me and combing my hair. We had to wake up every day at 5 a.m. to clean our rooms. Dragging the large vacuum from the first floor to the second floor was too much for me, and she helped.
Jimena was one of the only girls there who I was comfortable around. Then she left, and I missed her like I missed my mother. It was a loss after loss, each on top of the next.
Almost immediately after, I was reunited with my mom, I forgot a lot of what happened to me. Still, the effects were with me, even then.
My mother told me I had night terrors for weeks, where I bolted upright and screamed in my bed. I would wake up early in the morning, she said, and pretend to clean the house. I was apparently just acting like I had at the shelter, living, no doubt, in a way that had become normal to me. I don’t remember any of it.
Six years later, my mom and I are still in the U.S. I’m in high school and taking college-prep courses.
On the one hand, I think I’m doing well. On the other, I’m questioning my mental well-being. I’m less attached to people than I was before the separation. I’ve had trouble developing friendships; I often feel they’ll only be temporary.
Since I started high school, I’ve been forgetting things more and more. Once I was chatting with a friend about a book we were reading, and she told me things I said I’d liked about it, but I didn’t remember saying those things. I recently got a calendar to record my school assignments because I keep forgetting them; my mind goes blank.
My therapist told me these could all be after-effects of the separation.
In my English class we’ve been reading a novel, “The Memory Police,” by Yoko Ogawa. It’s about a police force that goes around seizing mundane objects that people are forbidden to have, like flowers, pets, and family photographs. Anyone caught with these sorts of items is disappeared or put to death. In class, we work together through questions raised by reading the book: Who controls these Memory Police? What is the government trying to accomplish with them? Why would it want its people to forget their history — even personal history?
In the novel, the memory police take things away. In real life, I have struggled to cast off the pall of what I have hung on to. My own memory keeps things that I wish it wouldn’t. Like cheese crackers with peanut butter. Like apples. I don’t want to even look at those foods anymore, much less eat them.
Especially with Trump coming into office again, with my and my family’s future cast into doubt, I wonder what things our own government might try to make us forget if it could. And what may we end up remembering, even against our will?
I have wrestled with what to say in this urgent moment, long yearned for and that often appeared beyond reach during these last 15 hideous months.
One of the questions that I grappled with was this: What could I possibly share with readers that would even remotely capture the meaning and profundity of an apparent agreement to stop the wholesale massacre of Palestinians?
I had not suffered. My home is intact. My family and I are alive and well. We are warm, together and safe.
So, the other pressing dilemma I confronted was: Is it my place to write at all? This space should be reserved, I thought, for Palestinians to reflect on the horrors they have endured and what is to come.
Their voices will, of course, be heard here and elsewhere in the days and weeks ahead. My voice, in this context, is insignificant and, under these grievous circumstances, borders on being irrelevant.
Still, if you and, in particular, Palestinians will oblige me, this is what I have to say:
I think that there are four words that each, in their own way, bear some significance to Wednesday’s happy news that the guns are poised to go silent.
The first and perhaps most fitting word is “relief”.
There will be ample time and opportunity for the “experts” to draw up their predictable scorecards of the “winners” and “losers” and the broader short- and long-term strategic implications of Wednesday’s deal.
There will, as well, be ample time and opportunity for more “experts” to consider the political consequences of Wednesday’s deal in the Middle East, Europe and Washington, DC.
My preoccupation, and I suspect the preoccupation of most Palestinians and their loved ones in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, is that peace has arrived finally.
How long it will last is a question best posed tomorrow. Today, let us all revel in the relief that is a dividend of peace.
Palestinian boys and girls are dancing with relief. After months of grief, loss and sadness, joy has returned. Smiles have returned. Hope has returned.
Let us enjoy a satisfying measure of relief, if not pleasure, in that.
There is relief in Israel, too.
The families of the surviving captives will soon be reunited with the brothers and sisters, daughters and sons, mothers and fathers, they have longed to embrace again.
They will, no doubt, require care and attention to heal the wounds to their minds, souls and bodies.
That will be another, most welcomed, dividend of peace.
The next word is “gratitude”.
Those of us who, day after dreadful day, have watched — bereft and helpless as a ruthless apartheid state has gone methodically about reducing Gaza to dust and memory — owe our deepest gratitude to the brave, determined helpers who have done their best to ease the pain and suffering of besieged Palestinians.
We owe our everlasting gratitude to the countless anonymous people, in countless places throughout Gaza and the West Bank, who, at grave risk and at the expense of so many young, promising lives, put the welfare of their Palestinian brothers and sisters ahead of their own.
We must be grateful for their selflessness and courage. They did their duty. They walked into the danger. They did not retreat. They stood firm. They held their ground. They rebuffed the purveyors of death and destruction who tried to erase their pride and dignity.
They reminded the world that humanity will prevail despite the occupier’s efforts to crush it.
The third word is “acknowledge”.
The world must acknowledge the steadfast resistance of Palestinians.
The occupier’s aim was to break the will and spirit of Palestinians. That has been the occupier’s intent for the past 75 years.
Once again, the occupier has failed.
Palestinians are indefatigable. They are, like their brethren in Ireland and South Africa, immovable.
They refuse to be routed from their land because they are wedded to it by faith and history. Their roots are too deep and indestructible.
Palestinians will decide their fate — not the marauding armies headed by racists and war criminals who cling to the antiquated notion that might is right.
It will take a little more time and patience, but the sovereignty and salvation that Palestinians have earned in blood and heartache is, I am convinced, approaching not far over the horizon.
The final word is “shame”.
There are politicians and governments who will forever wear the shame of permitting Israel to commit genocide against the people of Palestine.
These politicians and governments will deny it. The evidence of their crimes is plain. We can see it in the images of the apocalyptic landscape of Gaza. We will record every name of the more than 46,000 Palestinian victims of their complicity.
That will be their decrepit legacy.
Rather than stop the mass murder of innocents, they enabled it. Rather than prevent starvation and disease from claiming the lives of babies and children, they encouraged it. Rather than turn off the spigot of arms, they delivered them. Rather than shout “enough”, they spurred the killing to go on and on.
We will remember. We will not let them forget.
That is our responsibility: to make sure that they never escape the shame that will follow each and every one of them like a long, disfiguring shadow in the late-day sun.
Shame on them. Shame on them all.
Andrew Mitrovica is an award-winning writer and journalism educator at the University of Toronto. He has been an investigative reporter for a variety of news organisations and publications, including the CBC, CTV, Saturday Night Magazine, Reader’s Digest, the Walrus magazine and the Globe and Mail, where he was a member of the newspaper’s investigative unit. He is also a columnist for Al Jazeera.
With the temporary ceasefire agreement, we should take our hats off to the Palestinian people of Gaza who have withstood a total military onslaught from Israel but without surrendering or shifting from their land.
Over 15 months Israel has dropped well over 70,000 tonnes of bombs on this tiny 360 sq km strip of land, home to 2.3 million people.
This is more than the combined total of bombs dropped on London, Hamburg and Dresden during the six years of the Second World War.
PSNA national chair John Minto’s “human spirit” letter in solidarity with Palestinians. Image: The Press
Just as we saw in Vietnam and Afghanistan the determination to resist has proven itself more decisive than the overwhelming military firepower of Israel and the US.
Palestinian courage, tenacity and sumud (steadfastness) represent a triumph of the human spirit against overwhelming odds.
For New Zealand, the great tragedy has been our government [Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s National-led three-party coalition] response which has been to condemn every act of Palestinian resistance but refuse to condemn even the most blatant of Israeli war crimes.
Mr Luxon has put us on the wrong side of yet another human struggle for justice.
John Minto National Chair Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA)
Letter published in the The Press, Christchurch, on 18 January 2025.
There should be only one reason why people enter politics. It is for the good of the nation and the people who voted them in. It is to be their voice at the national level where the country’s future is decided.
The recent developments within the Samoan government are a stark reminder that people have chosen politics for reasons other than that. We are at a point where people are guessing what is next.
Will the faction backing Laauli Leuatea Schmidt continue on their path to remove Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mata’afa or will they bite the bullet and work together for the better of the nation?
The removal of the prime minister and the nation heading to snap elections has far-ranging implications. While the politicians plot and play a game of chess with the nation and its people, at the end of the day it will be people who will feel the adverse effects.
After the 2021 Constitutional Crisis and then the economic downturn from the effects of the measles lockdown and the covid-19 pandemic, the nation had just started recovering. A snap election would impact this recovery and the opportunity cost would be far greater than people have thought.
According to political scientist Dr Christina La’ala’i Tauasa, should the ruling party proceed with a vote of no confidence against the PM. In terms of party unity, a no-confidence vote could deepen internal divisions within the FAST party, potentially leading to a leadership crisis and a weakened government.
“Overall, there is Samoa’s political stability to carefully take into consideration as a successful vote of no confidence will no doubt destabilise the country’s political landscape, prompting more questions about the state of the party’s cohesion, particularly their ability and capacity to effectively govern and lead Samoa given their first term in government. The country and the FAST party cannot afford to go into a snap election, it would be a loss for all except the Opposition party,” she said.
The nation needs leadership that will drive economic growth, the development of infrastructure and basic services.
There is a hospital that is slowly falling apart, there are not enough doctors and nurses, teachers are needed in hundreds, people are unable to send children to school because of high education costs and the disabled population does not have access to equal opportunities in education and employment, better roads are needed, towns are getting flooded whenever it rains, there is a meth scourge which indicates the need for better control at the border, agriculture and fisheries are in dire need of fuel injection, many families are living in poverty, there is a need for an overhaul of the electricity infrastructure and not every household in the country can access clean water.
The list goes on. This should be the focus of the government and if the government is split then this cannot take place. It seems like there is a race to grab power at the expense of the people.
If politicians are concerned about the good of the nation and its people, all efforts should be made to have a government in place that would focus on these issues.
The days leading up to the first parliamentary session and thereafter will bring to light the true colours of the people we have elected. There will be two kinds, one who chose the path to genuinely help improve the lives of the people and prosper the nation and the second who only wants to prosper their needs.
Time will tell.
This Samoa Observer editorial was first published on 16 January 2025. Republished with permission.
In the days after President Joe Biden commuted his death sentence, 40-year-old Rejon Taylor felt like he’d been reborn. After facing execution for virtually his entire adult life for a crime he committed at 18, he was fueled by a new sense of purpose. He was “a man on a mission,” he told me in an email on Christmas Day. “I will not squander this opportunity of mercy, of life.”
Taylor saw new signs of life all around him. Biden had granted clemency to 37 of the 40 men on federal death row, an unprecedented move that none of them expected. One of his neighbors, a man who long ago seemed to have “fallen into an abyss in his fractured mind, never to return again,” suddenly appeared lucid, talking to Taylor instead of the voices in his head. “He even cleaned up his cell today, something he NEVER does. … He now has hope, despite a life sentence! I’m amazed!”
The sense of renewal was shared by men like Charles Hall, whose years on death row had been especially punishing. In a six-page letter to Biden, he vowed that the decision to grant clemency “will not be wasted on me.” Hall had earned a paralegal certificate while on death row and he planned to continue his education, he wrote, adding that change and positivity are possible “even behind razor wire, fences, walls, and bars.”
The outpourings of gratitude came amid a flurry of activity inside the Special Confinement Unit at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. Men sorted their belongings and packed their things. They had been told that the unit would likely be shut down and its residents transferred to other prisons. No one knew precisely when this would happen — or where they might end up — but it was best to be prepared. Prison transfers are notoriously disruptive, taking place with no advance notice, and sometimes lasting months.
Yet not everyone was eager for a new beginning. Within days of the announcement, two men had sent handwritten emergency petitions to a federal court in Indiana seeking to block the commutation of their death sentences. Neither of them had applied for clemency and both were adamant that they did not want it, arguing that it threatened to derail their efforts to prove their innocence in court. One of them decried Biden’s commutations as a “publicity stunt.” This week a third man, Iouri Mikhel, similarly objected to Biden’s reprieve.
While people on death row are automatically entitled to legal representation, those serving life without parole are not.
The challenges are a long shot to say the least. “The Court harbors serious doubt that it has any power to block a commutation,” a federal judge wrote in response to the first two filings. But the lawsuits also lay bare a sobering reality for most people who go from facing a death sentence to a life sentence with no chance of release. While people on death row are automatically entitled to legal representation, those serving life without parole are not. And for those who harbor even the faintest hope of overturning their convictions, a commutation can foreclose on legal avenues that once made it possible. This is true even for those who do not claim to be innocent but have challenged their convictions on other grounds, from ineffective advocacy by trial lawyers to racial bias to official misconduct.
With Taylor and his neighbors facing a lifetime behind bars — and with more questions than answers about what will happen next — the mood in Terre Haute has shifted. The initial wave of celebration has given way to anxiety over the future. Rumors have run rampant about the upcoming prison transfers; some days the men hear they will happen imminently, only to be told that it could be a while. Many are nervous about living in general population after years or even decades in solitary confinement.
In the thick of such uncertainty, the man whose mental illness seemed to recede after the commutations has gone back to his previous behaviors, sometimes yelling from behind his steel cell door, Taylor told me recently. “He’s falling back under the weight of his stress again.”
Significant Uncertainty
After an unprecedented 13 executions during Trump’s final six months in office, there was no question that his reelection spelled doom for the men in Terre Haute. Although Biden fell short of abolishing the federal death penalty as he vowed to do during his 2020 campaign, his mass clemency robbed Trump of a chance to carry out another execution spree. “In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted,” Biden said upon announcing the commutations.
Biden’s moratorium had been imposed in January 2021 by Attorney General Merrick Garland, who also announced a review of the federal protocol used to carry out Trump’s executions. After four years, the results were finally released this week. In a 25-page report, the Department of Justice addressed long-standing concerns over the method of lethal injection used to carry out Trump’s execution spree. Autopsy reports have long revealed that executions carried out by a single dose of pentobarbital (as well as other drug combinations) have led to pulmonary edema, the filling of fluid in the lungs.
Citing “significant uncertainty” about whether the pentobarbital executions inflicted “unnecessary pain and suffering,” Garland rescinded the government’s lethal injection protocol, calling on the Justice Department to “halt the use of pentobarbital unless and until that uncertainty is resolved.”
“The DOJ’s review has confirmed what medical experts have said for many years: pentobarbital causes excruciating pain when used to carry out executions,” death penalty lawyer Shawn Nolan said in a statement. While Garland’s actions could certainly complicate plans to restart federal executions, the truth is that Trump would have been unlikely to be able to carry out new executions soon after returning to office anyway. The three remaining men on death row — Dylann Roof, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and Robert Bowers — are a long ways off from exhausting their appeals.
Trump could theoretically restart executions sooner if the men fighting their commutations somehow prevail. Winning their lawsuits might allow their post-conviction appeals to continue in the short term — but if their challenges eventually fail, it would set them up for execution.
Shannon Agofsky, who filed his challenge late last year, says that’s a risk he is willing to take. “The fact that I do not want commutation may lead you to believe that I am mentally disturbed, suicidal, or somehow wishful of death,” he wrote in an email sent via his wife, Laura Agofsky, in late December. “That is not the case. I am in full possession of my faculties, and am not eager to die at all; in fact, I have much to live for.”
Agofsky found out about the commutations the same way as his neighbors: through media reports shortly after 5 a.m. on December 23. He immediately called Laura, who lives in Germany and was shopping for Christmas. She cried when she heard the news. “I sort of had a mental breakdown in the grocery store,” she told me in a phone call. Both of them assumed that he would lose his lawyers and that his legal challenges were now null and void. (His lawyers have since reassured him that they will continue to represent him.)
Agofsky was sent to death row after killing a man at USP Beaumont, a maximum security penitentiary known as one of the bloodiest prisons in the federal system. He swore it was an act of self-defense — and a key eyewitness later gave a sworn declaration saying he was coerced into pinning the blame on Agofsky. Nonetheless, in 2004, a federal jury found Agofsky guilty and sentenced him to death based on the fact that he had previously been convicted of a different murder.
But Agofsky is adamant that he is innocent of the first crime. He had been sent to Beaumont after being convicted and sentenced to life alongside his brother for a 1989 bank robbery and killing. The case against him turned almost entirely on fingerprints matched to Agofsky — a type of forensic evidence that, while ubiquitous, has since been revealed to be unreliable, especially given the analytical techniques used at the time.
It was not until Agofsky was sentenced to die that he was able to secure lawyers who investigated both his cases and found evidence questioning his original conviction. Though records in his case remain under seal, he argues that they expose his wrongful conviction — and that Biden’s commutation order came just as he was “on the cusp” of proving his innocence.
Agofsky wrote in an email that he would do “whatever it takes, go to any lengths, to prove that my brother and I did not rob a bank, or kill a banker.” At their 1992 sentencing, his brother Joseph accused the government of manufacturing evidence, telling the court “our innocence will be proven eventually.” Joseph Agofsky died in prison in 2013.
In his legal filing, Agofsky invoked the “heightened scrutiny” courts are supposed to give death penalty cases. “To commute his sentence now, while the defendant has active litigation in court, is to strip him of the protection of heightened scrutiny,” he wrote.
Len Davis, the second man who challenged his commutation in December, for his part argued that he “has always maintained that having a death sentence would draw attention to overwhelming misconduct” in his case.
Davis, a former New Orleans police officer, was convicted and sentenced to death for ordering the murder of a woman who had allegedly filed a complaint against him. Unlike Agofsky, he has no pending appeals remaining. But Davis told me that he is not afraid that his lawsuit would leave him vulnerable to execution. “First, I’m a Born-Again believer in Jesus The Christ,” he wrote in an email. “I can’t be scared with a trip to heaven.” What’s more, he argued, “Trump should be able to empathize with me about D.O.J Misconduct.” He hopes that by rejecting a commutation, he will draw more attention to his innocence claim — and possibly receive a pardon.
On January 14, federal prosecutors filed responses to the emergency petitions, calling the judge’s doubts about his power to block a commutation order “well-founded.” Under existing case law, “a prisoner’s consent is not necessary when the President unconditionally commutes a federal death sentence to a life sentence,” they wrote. Two days later, a lawyer appointed to represent Agofsky and Davis summarized their arguments in response, but ultimately agreed with the government that the court “does not have the power to block” the commutations.
Craving Connections
By the second week of January, rumors swirled among the men in Terre Haute that the transfers would happen far sooner than expected. There were whispers that most, if not all, of them might be headed, at least temporarily, to ADX Florence in Colorado, the highest security penitentiary in the federal system. For Taylor, who craves community and human connection, such an environment would be hard to take. In contrast to the Special Confinement Unit, where residents have access to phone calls and emails, ADX is notorious for its isolation.
An undated photo of Rejon Taylor at the Special Confinement Unit at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind.Photo: Courtesy of the Taylor family
Taylor found himself unprepared. He had previously heard that the Bureau of Prisons was willing to at least consider housing preferences from the men whose sentences had been commuted. He hoped to get into a residential program that was available right there in Terre Haute. The program, called Life Connections, is “designed for inmates who are sincerely interested in seeking their faith, or improving their social responsibility,” according to the Bureau of Prisons. Participation is up to the chaplain — and Taylor, who is known for his empathy and desire to make a positive impact inside and outside prison walls, could be an ideal candidate.
In an email responding to questions from The Intercept, Bureau of Prisons spokesperson Scott Taylor wrote that the men whose death sentences were commuted “will be transferred to an institution commensurate with their respective safety, security, health, and programming needs.” He did not provide a timeline, but the rumored imminent transfers have not come to pass.
With Trump’s inauguration just a few days away, Taylor and his neighbors remain in limbo. For now, his cell is packed. His beloved art supplies and family pictures are in boxes, which he will send to loved ones for safekeeping. His walls are mostly bare, save for a calendar featuring cityscapes and a photo of one of his paralegals with her French bulldog. Rather than distract himself with TV, he’s trying to prepare himself mentally, he said, the same way he did before the commutations were announced: by envisioning the worst-case scenario while hoping for the best. “If you sit with anxiety, it helps you prepare for the future.”
COMMENTARY:By Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson and Junior S. Ami
With just over a year left in her tenure as Prime Minister of Samoa, Fiame Naomi Mata’afa faces a political upheaval threatening a peaceful end to her term.
Ironically, the rule of law — the very principle that elevated her to power — has now become the source of significant challenges within her party.
Fiame left the Human Rights Protection Party (HRPP) in 2020, opposing constitutional amendments she believed undermined judicial independence. Her decision reflected a commitment to democratic principles and a rejection of increasing authoritarianism within the HRPP.
She joined the newly formed Fa’atuatua i le Atua Samoa ua Tasi (FAST) party, created by former HRPP members seeking an alternative to decades of one-party dominance.
As FAST’s leader, Fiame led the party to a historic victory in the 2021 election, becoming Samoa’s first female Prime Minister and ending the HRPP’s nearly 40-year rule.
Her leadership is now under threat from within her own party.
FAST Founder, chairman and former Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries La’auli Leuatea Polataivao Schmidt, faces criminal charges, including conspiracy and harassment. These developments have escalated into calls for Fiame’s removal from her party.
Deputy charged with offences
On 3 January 2025, La’auli publicly revealed he had been charged with offences including conspiracy to obstruct justice, fabricating evidence, and harassment. These charges prompted widespread speculation, fueled by misinformation spread primarily via Facebook, that the charges were related to allegations of his involvement in an ongoing investigation into the death of a 19-year-old victim of a hit-and-run.
Following La’auli’s refusal to resign from his role as Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries, Fiame removed his portfolio on January 10, citing the need to uphold the integrity of her Cabinet.
“As Prime Minister, I had hoped that the former minister would choose to resign. This is a common stance often considered by esteemed public office custodians if allegations or charges are laid against them,” she explained.
In response to his dismissal, La’auli stated publicly: “I accept the decision with a humble heart.” He maintained his innocence, saying, “I am clean from all of this,” and expressed confidence that the truth will prevail.
La’auli urged his supporters to remain calm and emphasised his commitment to clearing his name while continuing to serve as a Member of Parliament for Gagaifomauga 3.
Following his removal, the Samoan media reported that members of the FAST party wrote a letter to Fiame requesting her removal as Prime Minister.
Three ministers dismissed
In response, Fiame dismissed three Cabinet Ministers, Mulipola Anarosa Ale-Molio’o (Women, Community, and Social Development), Toelupe Poumulinuku Onesemo (Communication and Information Technology), and Leota Laki Sio (Commerce, Industry, and Labor) — allegedly involved in the effort to unseat her.
Fiame emphasised the need for a cohesive and trustworthy Cabinet, stating the importance of maintaining confidence in her leadership.
Amid rumors of calls for her removal within the FAST party, Fiame acknowledged the party’s authority to replace her as its leader but clarified that only Parliament could determine her status as Prime Minister.
She expressed her determination to fulfill her duties despite internal challenges, though she did not specify the level of support she retains within the party.
Samoa’s Parliament is set to convene next Tuesday, where these tensions may reach a critical point. La’auli, facing multiple criminal charges, remains a focal point of the ongoing political turmoil.
A day after the announcement, on January 15, four new Ministers were sworn into office by Head of State Tuimaleali’ifano Va’aleto’a Sualauvi II at a ceremony attended by family, friends, and some FAST members.
The new Ministers are Faleomavaega Titimaea Tafua (Commerce, Industry, and Labour), Laga’aia Ti’aitu’au Tufuga (Women, Community, and Social Development), Mau’u Siaosi Pu’epu’emai (Communications and Information Technology), and Niu’ava Eti Malolo (Agriculture and Fisheries).
FAST caucus voted against Fiame
Later that evening, FAST chairman La’auli announced that 20 members of the FAST caucus had decided to remove Fiame from the leadership of FAST and expel her from the party along with five other Cabinet Ministers — Tuala Tevaga Ponifasio (Deputy Prime Minister), Leatinuu Wayne Fong, Olo Fiti Vaai, Faualo Harry Schuster, and Toesulusulu Cedric Schuster.
In Samoa, if an MP ceases to maintain affiliation with the political party under which they were elected — whether through resignation or expulsion, their seat is declared vacant if they choose to move to another party or form a new party.
These provisions aim to preserve political stability, prevent party-hopping, and maintain the integrity of parliamentary representation, with byelections held as needed to fill vacancies.
Under Section 142 of Samoa’s Electoral Act 2019, if the Speaker believes an MP’s seat has become vacant as per Section 141, they are required to formally charge the MP with that vacation.
If the Legislative Assembly is in session, this charge must be made orally during the Assembly. Fiame and the four FAST members can choose to maintain their seats in Parliament as Independents.
Former Prime Minister and now opposition leader Tuilaepa Sa’ilele Malielegaoi remarked that what should have been internal FAST issues had spilled into the public sphere.
“We have been watching and we continue to watch what they do and how they deal with their problems,” he stated.
Freedom of expression
When asked whether he would consider a coalition or support one side of FAST, Tuilaepa declined to reveal the opposition’s strategy, citing potential reactions from the other side. He emphasised the importance of adhering to democratic processes and protecting constitutional rights, including freedom of expression.
As Parliament prepares to reconvene on January 21, Facebook has become a battlefield for misinformation and defamatory discourse, particularly among FAST supporters in diaspora communities in the US, Australia, and New Zealand.
Divisions have emerged between supporters of Fiame and La’auli, leading to vitriol directed at politicians and journalists covering the crisis. La’auli, leveraging his social media following, has conducted Facebook Live sessions to assert his innocence and rally support.
Currently, FAST holds 35 seats in Parliament, while the opposition HRPP controls 18. If the removal of five MPs is factored in, FAST would retain 30 MPs, though La’auli claims that 20 members support Fiame’s removal. This leaves 10 MPs who may either support Fiame or remain neutral.
If FAST fails to expel Fiame, La’auli’s faction may push for a motion of no confidence against her.
Such a motion requires 27 votes to pass, potentially making the opposition pivotal in determining the outcome. This could lead to either Fiame’s removal or the dissolution of Parliament for a snap election.
As Samoa faces this political crisis, its democratic institutions undergo a significant test.
Fiame remains committed to the rule of law, while La’auli advocates for her removal.
Reflecting on the stakes, Fiame warned: “Disregarding the rule of law will undoubtedly have far-reaching negative impacts, including undermining our judiciary system and the abilities of our law enforcement agencies to fulfill their duties.”
For now, Samoa watches and waits as its political future hangs in the balance.
Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson is a Samoan journalist with over 20 years of experience reporting on the Pacific Islands. She is founding editor-in-chief of The New Atoll, a digital commentary magazine focusing on Pacific island geopolitics. Junior S. Ami is a photojournalist based in Samoa. He has covered national events for the Samoa Observer newspaper and runs a private photography business. Republished from the Devpolicy Blog with permission.
Huge crowds are expected next week at the trial of the “Hastings Three”, who were charged nearly a year ago for their part in protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The Hastings Three: up in court
NHS worker Clem McCulloch, 33, artist Thomas Delves, 25, and retired train driver Laurie Holden, 72, were arrested at General Dynamics arms factory on February 29 last year during a peaceful protest organized by the Hastings & District Palestine Solidarity Campaign (HDPSC) and supported by a coalition of community groups including Jewish groups, social justice and climate justice groups, parent groups, and political parties.
All three will plead not guilty to charges of aggravated trespass when they come before a district judge at Brighton Magistrates Court on Wednesday 22 January.
The charge carries a maximum tariff of a three-month jail term and £2,500 fine.
They are expected to be joined by a large number of supporters as local groups across the county – including Brighton Stop the War, University of Sussex Friends of Palestine and Brighton and Hove Palestine Solidarity Campaign (BHPSC) – have called a ‘solidarity rally’ in support of the three men.
Ahead of the trial, BHPSC’s executive committee released a statement:
BHPSC is a sister PSC branch to Hastings & District PSC, and have followed the case of the #Hastings3 with great interest – not least because we in Brighton know too well the indignation caused locally by having an arms factory based in our city – an arms factory (like General Dynamics in Hastings) that is deeply complicit in the ongoing genocide being perpetrated by Israel upon the people of Gaza.
The statement went on:
The executive committee of BHPSC sends our solidarity to the three defendants whose case will be heard here in Brighton on the 22nd of January.
Our many local members and supporters will be outside the court in large numbers on the 22nd to voice our support for our Hastings comrades, who are on trial for doing nothing more than exercising their right to peaceful non-violent protest.
Compared with the appalling crimes against humanity being facilitated by the General Dynamics factory in Hastings and other weapons manufacturers in the UK, the actions of the #Hastings3 register as expressions of conscience rather than crimes.
General Dynamics: complicit in genocide
General Dynamics is the fifth largest global arms manufacturer and is responsible for all the MK80 bombs being dropped on Gaza.
Laurie Holden, from Burwash, said:
It is appalling that ordinary people like myself are in the dock instead of General Dynamics, which is making a killing from genocide. This will be the sixth time our case has come before the court, representing a disgusting waste of taxpayer’s money. Meanwhile, General Dynamics made $3.3 billion profit in 2023.
“The Hastings Three are not guilty” said Grace Lally, twinning officer for the Hastings & District PSC:
General Dynamics is guilty of profiting from war crimes and genocide. Two thousand pound bombs made by General Dynamics have been dropped on families sheltering in tents in the so-called safe zone of Al Mawasi, where our friends live and our community has deep connections. Nothing can justify this.
General Dynamics has come under sustained pressure from concerned locals for its part in Israel’s 15-month campaign in Gaza.
Hastings & District PSC has led more than a dozen actions to the two arms factory sites in Hastings since November 2023, including die-ins, marches, pickets and a 48-hour peace camp and the sites have also been subject to regular and spontaneous ‘pop up’ protests.
Supporting the Hastings Three
Mum-of-one Olivia Cavanagh said:
We don’t want this weapons manufacturer here in our town, making money from slaughtering innocent Palestinians, making us complicit in war crimes.
A legal fighting fund for the three men has raised nearly £5,000 but still has some way to go to cover all their legal costs.
“The outrageous and expensive pursuit of the #Hastings3 does not stand in isolation but forms part of a nationwide clamp down on peaceful protest” said Katy Colley, HDPSC Chair:
Our friends are good men of conscience who, like the rest of us, cannot bear to see the wholesale destruction and annihilation we are witnessing in Gaza. The majority in this country stand against genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid. For fifteen months, people up and down the country have protested the UK’s complicity in the worst crime of our time, demanding that the UK stops arming Israel. Yet our government refuses to listen and those who speak out are smeared, defamed and persecuted.
There are now over 46,000 confirmed dead in Gaza – mostly women and children – though a report this month in the Lancet estimated the real death toll to be at least 40% higher with the number of deaths in the first nine months alone estimated to be over 64,000.
Men inspect their home following an Israeli airstrike in Deir el-Balah, Gaza Strip, on Jan. 15, 2025.Photo: Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via AP
Tens of thousands of Palestinians are dead. So too are scores of aid workers and journalists. Entire communities have been turned to rubble, leaving residents displaced or homeless.
Israel is more isolated than ever. Europe has turned against free speech. And despite a campus protest movement that rivals the opposition to Vietnam War, the U.S. government remains steadfast in its support for Israel’s war machine.
Drones and AI-enabled warfare have cheapened the value of life, while global crackdowns on dissent herald in a new age of censorship.
These are the contours of a world after the war in Gaza — contours carved deep into the political landscape, deep into reality, not soon to be smoothed out. As we await the Israeli cabinet’s decision on a ceasefire in Gaza, the Middle East — and the world — has been completely reshaped as a result of the past 15 months of fighting.
And yet, after the ceasefire, so much will remain the same. A hundred Israelis are, for now, at least, still being held hostage. The Israeli military continues to seize territory by force in the countries that surround it, deepening its 76-year military occupation, and the expansion of its settlements. It reserves the right to keep attacking Palestinians.
Allegations of genocide aren’t disappearing; they grow more credible by the day.
It is, by no means, a given that the ceasefire agreement reached this week will hold. Israel has already signaled that it reserves the right to reengage militarily at any point and that it maintains its aim of “destroying” Hamas. The Palestinian group is unlikely to agree to terms that ensure its own demise.
This is not a true end to the conflict.
In all likelihood, the ceasefire agreement will hold to the pattern of past Israeli deals with the Palestinians: immediate concessions for Israel and then a slow-rolling of the rest of the plan — the rebuilding and anything else that might significantly improve the position of the Palestinians, especially in Gaza.
The virtual destruction of Gaza and the global ramifications are not just a result of the effects of October 7. It’s a 76-year process of deliberate de-development of Palestinian life in their historic homelands. In Gaza, this phenomenon is at its most acute.
Since the establishment of the state of Israel, Gaza has only ever been an open-air prison, or a collection of mass graves.
The rise of Hamas in 2007 was preceded by the blockade in 1991. Even before then, it was abysmal sanitation, inadequate health care, and a lack of adequate employment opportunities that plagued Gaza.
Other than Hamas, the largest employer in Gaza before the war was the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA. This is not an economy, nor could it ever lead to anything sustainable. Since the establishment of the state of Israel, Gaza has only ever been an open-air prison, or a collection of mass graves — Israel’s repository for displaced Palestinians from inside what today are Israel’s internationally recognized borders. And nothing about this week’s ceasefire will do anything to change that.
The world bearing witness to the horrors within Gaza’s walls will continue to haunt us all. And the extraordinary escalation of violence and the loss of humanity in the region will stain a generation.
There is little doubt that Israel will become more politically isolated from its neighbors, and that it will need to maintain a forever war. Its position is still buoyed by American support. The global protest movement against the war and crimes in Gaza may lose intensity, but the young people traumatized by them will not forget — and the ongoing suffering of Palestinians will not let them.
Consider what’s not in the deal. Nowhere in the reported terms of the agreement is there a mention of a path away from dehumanization, of a path toward basic human rights, or a path to lasting peace.
An end to the most intense assault on Gaza will be a relief, a temporary respite from more than a year of bloodshed, but there’s little here to celebrate.
The Israeli Ministry of Defense has poured more than $3.7 million into developing warfare technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 2015, according to a recent report from students and faculty organizing against the war in Gaza.
The findings come as MIT administrators are under growing pressure for censuring student publications criticizing MIT’s research and advocating for Palestinian human rights. The school has also faced criticism for barring student protesters from campus.
The report was published last month by the MIT Coalition for Palestine, which represents 19 student and faculty groups on campus, including MIT Divest, MIT Jews for Collective Liberation, and MIT Faculty and Staff for Palestine.
Coalition members used the university’s internal grant-tracking software to obtain granular new details about projects that have received Israeli military funding. Among the projects were partnerships to research underwater surveillance, missile detection, and drone algorithms.
“MIT has engaged in a sustained and organized campaign of disinformation and propaganda.”
After the student organizers began further probing grant information, the school took down the grant software used for the coalition’s research, said Rich Solomon, a member and MIT graduate student who worked on the report.
“MIT has engaged in a sustained and organized campaign of disinformation and propaganda in order to silence and suppress this information,” Solomon told The Intercept.
The new report also details the extent of MIT’s partnerships with Israeli military contractors like Elbit Systems, which supplies 85 percent of Israel’s killer drones, and Maersk, one of the world’s largest shipping companies, that has sent millions of pounds of military goods to Israel since the start of the war on Gaza. The Israeli military also sponsored several of the MIT projects with funds provided by the U.S. Defense Department.
MIT spokesperson Sarah McDonnell did not respond to specific questions about the report but pointed to statements from the school’s president, provost, and chancellor condemning “harassment, intimidation and targeting” of specific professors and their research.
“We respect that there are a range of views across that group on any number of topics, and as a general practice our office does not comment to the media about the individually held and freely expressed views of particular students or alumni,” McDonnell said in a statement to The Intercept. “MIT and its leadership are committed to promoting student well-being, protecting free speech, and responding to policy violations as appropriate.”
Protests against the war on Gaza started on MIT’s campus in late 2023 — part of the wave of nationwide campus demonstrations about Israel’s assault. MIT leadership has since resisted overwhelming calls from students and faculty to divest from research that supports what critics say is Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Inresponses to frequently asked questions posted in May, the office of MIT Chancellor Melissa Nobles said only three contracts with the Israeli military are currently active, totaling $180,000.
Solomon, the graduate student, said MIT administrators have tried to suppress the coalition’s new findings.
A campus newspaper retracted an article about the report earlier this month; its op-ed section has since been suspended until further notice. The paper’s editorial team said it had retracted the article — an examination of MIT professor Daniela Rus’s Israeli-funded research that was originally published on November 7 — after deliberation with its executive committee and faculty advisers.
McDonnell, the MIT spokesperson, said that the publication, The Tech, is editorially and financially independent from the school and that MIT had no role in the decision to temporarily suspend the publication’s opinion page or remove the article. Rus did not respond to a request for comment.
“Our decision was made in light of increasing hostile rhetoric and action against Professor Daniela Rus and her laboratory,” publisher Ellie Montemayor wrote in an addendum to the article December 9.
“Our piece detailed how Prof. Daniela Rus, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, uses Israeli Ministry of Defense money to develop algorithms with applications in ‘multirobot security defense and surveillance,’” the authors wrote in a post on the news site Mondoweiss. “Rather than engage with these publicly verifiable facts, the Tech’s editorial board (under consultation with Prof. Rus) retracted our op-ed.”
Israeli-Funded Research
“Autonomous Robotic Swarms: Distributed Coordination and Perception” and “Terahertz Quantum-Cascade Lasers and Imaging” — these are just two of the projects funded by the Israeli military at MIT research labs cited in the new report.
MIT’s research ties to Israel have been a focus of campus protests over the last two years. But the new report underscores the extent of the school’s collaboration with major military contractors like Maersk and Elbit, as well as the potential applications of the school’s research to Israel’s most recent military operations in Gaza.
One lab explored underwater monitoring and autonomous docking technologies that could help Israel police its sea blockade of the coastal Gaza Strip. Then there was the MIT project focused on drone swarms, including armed quadcopters powered by artificial intelligence, which can mimic the sounds of women and children in distress. Israel has reportedly used the technology to lure and kill people in Gaza.
“An ethical scientist and an ethical institution pursue scientific avenues that affirm life, that help repair the world, and that refuse to allow abusive militaries to launder their reputations while they commit mass murder,” the report’s authors wrote.
MIT also has partnerships with multinational corporations whose work helps supply Israel with weapons and equipment to carry out its occupation of Palestine — firms like Elbit Systems, Maersk, Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar, and others. Raytheon, which started at MIT and has an active partnership with the school to place students at the company, supplies Israel with missiles and bombs. MIT also partners with other major U.S. companies that supply the Israeli military with weapons, research, and cloud computing services like Boeing, Aurora Flight Sciences, Google, and Amazon.
“These collaborations grant genocide profiteers privileged access to MIT talent and expertise,” the authors wrote.
Cutting off research partnerships with Israel emerged as a core demand of campus protests this spring. In March, 63 percent of undergraduate students voted for a referendum calling on the student union to advocate for a ceasefire in Gaza — one of the highest-turnout elections in the school’s history. In April, members of the MIT Graduate Student Union, UE Local 256, overwhelmingly adopted a resolution calling for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and demanding that the university cut all research ties with the Israeli military.
The MIT Chancellor Office said that negotiations with students fell short because they hinged on the demand that MIT cut funding ties with the Israeli military. “There are a number of compelling reasons not to unilaterally terminate active research agreements made by individual PIs” — principle investigators — “in compliance with law and policy,” the chancellor’s office explained in the FAQ section on student protests.
MIT has cut ties with other international actors in cases where there are concerns that the university’s research could legitimize or exacerbate abuses of human and civil rights. The school ended partnerships with Saudi Aramco in 2020, for instance, after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. MIT also conductselevated risk assessments for projects funded by people or organizations in Saudi Arabia and China to address concerns about legitimizing or furthering violations of human and civil rights.
A 2022 report on the university’s engagement with China recommended that MIT not enter into “collaborations that might contribute to human rights abuses by foreign governments against their own citizens.” The report listed circumstances that would disqualify a Chinese company from partnering with MIT, including any direct involvement in government intelligence activities, armed forces, or other services with military applications.
“MIT’s research ties with the Israeli government similarly contribute to elevating the latter’s reputation despite its ongoing crimes against humanity,” the report said. “Why should MIT engage in research sponsorships with the Israeli government at all given the scale of its human rights abuses in Palestine?”
The Israeli Ministry of Defense has poured more than $3.7 million into developing warfare technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 2015, according to a recent report from students and faculty organizing against the war in Gaza.
The findings come as MIT administrators are under growing pressure for censuring student publications criticizing MIT’s research and advocating for Palestinian human rights. The school has also faced criticism for barring student protesters from campus.
The report was published last month by the MIT Coalition for Palestine, which represents 19 student and faculty groups on campus, including MIT Divest, MIT Jews for Collective Liberation, and MIT Faculty and Staff for Palestine.
Coalition members used the university’s internal grant-tracking software to obtain granular new details about projects that have received Israeli military funding. Among the projects were partnerships to research underwater surveillance, missile detection, and drone algorithms.
“MIT has engaged in a sustained and organized campaign of disinformation and propaganda.”
After the student organizers began further probing grant information, the school took away access to the grant software used for the coalition’s research, said Rich Solomon, a member and MIT graduate student who worked on the report.
“MIT has engaged in a sustained and organized campaign of disinformation and propaganda in order to silence and suppress this information,” Solomon told The Intercept.
The new report also details the extent of MIT’s partnerships with Israeli military contractors like Elbit Systems, which supplies 85 percent of Israel’s killer drones, and Maersk, one of the world’s largest shipping companies, that has sent millions of pounds of military goods to Israel since the start of the war on Gaza. The Israeli military also sponsored several of the MIT projects with funds provided by the U.S. Defense Department.
MIT spokesperson Sarah McDonnell did not respond to specific questions about the report but pointed to statements from the school’s president, provost, and chancellor condemning “harassment, intimidation and targeting” of specific professors and their research.
“We respect that there are a range of views across that group on any number of topics, and as a general practice our office does not comment to the media about the individually held and freely expressed views of particular students or alumni,” McDonnell said in a statement to The Intercept. “MIT and its leadership are committed to promoting student well-being, protecting free speech, and responding to policy violations as appropriate.”
Protests against the war on Gaza started on MIT’s campus in late 2023 — part of the wave of nationwide campus demonstrations about Israel’s assault. MIT leadership has since resisted overwhelming calls from students and faculty to divest from research that supports what critics say is Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Inresponses to frequently asked questions posted in May, the office of MIT Chancellor Melissa Nobles said only three contracts with the Israeli military are currently active, totaling $180,000.
Solomon, the graduate student, said MIT administrators have tried to suppress the coalition’s new findings.
A campus newspaper retracted an article about the report earlier this month; its op-ed section has since been suspended until further notice. The paper’s editorial team said it had retracted the article — an examination of MIT professor Daniela Rus’s Israeli-funded research that was originally published on November 7 — after deliberation with its executive committee and faculty advisers.
McDonnell, the MIT spokesperson, said that the publication, The Tech, is editorially and financially independent from the school and that MIT had no role in the decision to temporarily suspend the publication’s opinion page or remove the article. Rus did not respond to a request for comment.
“Our decision was made in light of increasing hostile rhetoric and action against Professor Daniela Rus and her laboratory,” publisher Ellie Montemayor wrote in an addendum to the article December 9.
“Our piece detailed how Prof. Daniela Rus, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, uses Israeli Ministry of Defense money to develop algorithms with applications in ‘multirobot security defense and surveillance,’” the authors wrote in a post on the news site Mondoweiss. “Rather than engage with these publicly verifiable facts, the Tech’s editorial board (under consultation with Prof. Rus) retracted our op-ed.”
Israeli-Funded Research
“Autonomous Robotic Swarms: Distributed Coordination and Perception” and “Terahertz Quantum-Cascade Lasers and Imaging” — these are just two of the projects funded by the Israeli military at MIT research labs cited in the new report.
MIT’s research ties to Israel have been a focus of campus protests over the last two years. But the new report underscores the extent of the school’s collaboration with major military contractors like Maersk and Elbit, as well as the potential applications of the school’s research to Israel’s most recent military operations in Gaza.
One lab explored underwater monitoring and autonomous docking technologies that could help Israel police its sea blockade of the coastal Gaza Strip. Then there was the MIT project focused on drone swarms, including armed quadcopters powered by artificial intelligence, which can mimic the sounds of women and children in distress. Israel has reportedly used the technology to lure and kill people in Gaza.
“An ethical scientist and an ethical institution pursue scientific avenues that affirm life, that help repair the world, and that refuse to allow abusive militaries to launder their reputations while they commit mass murder,” the report’s authors wrote.
MIT also has partnerships with multinational corporations whose work helps supply Israel with weapons and equipment to carry out its occupation of Palestine — firms like Elbit Systems, Maersk, Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar, and others. Raytheon, which started at MIT and has an active partnership with the school to place students at the company, supplies Israel with missiles and bombs. MIT also partners with other major U.S. companies that supply the Israeli military with weapons, research, and cloud computing services like Boeing, Aurora Flight Sciences, Google, and Amazon.
“These collaborations grant genocide profiteers privileged access to MIT talent and expertise,” the authors wrote.
Cutting off research partnerships with Israel emerged as a core demand of campus protests this spring. In March, 63 percent of undergraduate students voted for a referendum calling on the student union to advocate for a ceasefire in Gaza — one of the highest-turnout elections in the school’s history. In April, members of the MIT Graduate Student Union, UE Local 256, overwhelmingly adopted a resolution calling for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and demanding that the university cut all research ties with the Israeli military.
The MIT Chancellor Office said that negotiations with students fell short because they hinged on the demand that MIT cut funding ties with the Israeli military. “There are a number of compelling reasons not to unilaterally terminate active research agreements made by individual PIs” — principle investigators — “in compliance with law and policy,” the chancellor’s office explained in the FAQ section on student protests.
MIT has cut ties with other international actors in cases where there are concerns that the university’s research could legitimize or exacerbate abuses of human and civil rights. The school ended partnerships with Saudi Aramco in 2020, for instance, after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. MIT also conductselevated risk assessments for projects funded by people or organizations in Saudi Arabia and China to address concerns about legitimizing or furthering violations of human and civil rights.
A 2022 report on the university’s engagement with China recommended that MIT not enter into “collaborations that might contribute to human rights abuses by foreign governments against their own citizens.” The report listed circumstances that would disqualify a Chinese company from partnering with MIT, including any direct involvement in government intelligence activities, armed forces, or other services with military applications.
“MIT’s research ties with the Israeli government similarly contribute to elevating the latter’s reputation despite its ongoing crimes against humanity,” the report said. “Why should MIT engage in research sponsorships with the Israeli government at all given the scale of its human rights abuses in Palestine?”
Two Just Stop Oil supporters who sprayed Heathrow departure boards with orange paint during the Oil Kills, international uprising to end fossil fuels last July have won a temporary reprieve as their jury failed to reach a majority decision.
Just Stop Oil: legal shenanigans
Phoebe Plummer and Jane Touil were appearing before judge Duncan at Isleworth Crown Court accused of criminal damage over £5,000 for their action on 30 July 2024 to demand a fossil fuel treaty to end oil and gas by 2030.
The trial, which lasted nine days, ended when the jury failed to reach a majority decision.
The judge has scheduled a retrial for May 2026.
Phoebe was remanded for 58 days and Jane for 14 days following the action in which the pair used fire extinguishers to spray water-based paint at the departure boards in the terminal. The Crown alleged that the Just Stop Oil action caused £8,000 worth of damages.
Phoebe is currently serving a two year prison sentence for criminal damage for throwing soup on a Van Gogh painting in October 2022. They were sentenced by Judge Hehir at South Crown Court on 27 September 2024, a sentence that is now being challenged in an appeal scheduled for 29-30 January 2025.
During the trial, Judge Duncan ruled out the defence of necessity, saying this did not extend to civil disobedience and what she called the Just Stop Oil defendants’ “honestly held opinions” about climate change.
Jane Touil responded that:
It is not accurate to say that I am acting on my beliefs. It [the climate crisis] is not ‘a cause’. This is physics, an objective reality. I can see that everything is at risk. We only do the right thing if we know what’s going on.
Phoebe was not allowed to be present in court to make their closing speech as during the course of the trial, the heating system in the holding cells at Isleworth Crown court, contracted to the private company Serco broke down and no one currently in custody could be produced in court.
‘Following the law and doing the right thing are not the same thing’
A Just Stop Oil supporter who was present throughout the trial said that:
Phoebe and Jane had all their substantial defences removed, a severely mismanaged prosecution, logistical nightmares and a jury that was told to completely disregard their motivations. This is absolutely huge!
In her closing speech Phoebe Plummer said:
I have struggled with not being able to talk about the climate crisis – hearing it being called irrelevant feels inhumane and dishonest. The prosecution says I’m ‘committed to breaking the law’; my only commitment is to act in line with my conscience.
They say ‘I do what I like without thinking about the law’. I don’t think following the law and doing the right thing are always the same thing.
I cannot be a bystander to suffering where I see it. Nonviolence means being honest and living in line with the truth. I need to tell the truth about what I see. I act in a way that I think will be effective in saving life. When a doctor breaks a rib while doing CPR the doctor’s intent is still obviously saving life not causing grievous bodily harm, the context always matters.
Last week, Dr. Gianluca Grimalda and the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW) accepted the settlement proposed by the Kiel Regional Labor Court in the lawsuit filed by Dr Grimalda for unfair dismissal. The settlement was agreed on during the appeals process, after Dr. Grimalda’s original lawsuit was rejected last February.
Dr. Grimalda: a bittersweet victory
On 9 October 2023, IfW notified Dr. Grimalda of the termination of his research contract due to his failure to return to Germany by plane from his fieldwork in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea.
Although the original plan approved by IfW was for Dr. Grimalda to return by ‘slow travel’, IfW ordered Dr. Grimalda to return by plane after he failed to show up in Kiel on the agreed date. Dr Grimalda claims that his delay was due to visa deferrals, security threats, volcano activity and other logistical impediments.
This was the first known case of an employee being fired for refusing to take a plane to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The settlement stipulates that the contract was terminated with ordinary dismissal because of incompatible ideological convictions between the parties. The immediate termination by IfW was repealed and IfW will exonerate Dr. Grimalda from any breach of contract.
In view of the strained relationship with his employer if the employment relationship were to continue, he agreed to receive a severance payment from IfW when he left his employment relationship.
‘Sad and happy’
Its exact amount can not be disclosed due to a confidentiality agreement. Dr. Grimalda intends to donate 75,000 euros, part of this severance payment, for the purpose of environmental and climate protection and climate crisis activism.
“I feel sad and happy at the same time”, he said:
Sad because I lost a job I loved. Happy because the judge implicitly recognised the impossibility of dismissing an employee because of his refusal to take a plane. I hope that my case will inspire more employees, institutions and companies to actively support the transition from fossil fuel-based economies to decarbonized and people-centered societies.
I am determined to carry on with my research even though the job applications I made this year were unsuccessful. In 2025, I plan to slow-travel to Papua New Guinea again to further investigate the adaptation of the local population to climate change. Once I am back, my work as a climate activist will resume.
“Academics have multiple channels to alert about the climate and biodiversity crisis, and modifying their personal contribution to greenhouse gas emissions is an important way to demonstrate credibility”, says Wolfgang Cramer, Research Director at CNRS, France, and former contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report.
Dr Grimalda, who has been slow-travelling for more than 10 years, calculated that slow-travelling 28,000km from Papua New Guinea to Europe reduced greenhouse gases emissions, responsible for the rise in temperatures and extreme weather events, by a factor of 10 compared to flying.
An uncertain precedent, despite Dr. Grimalda’s outcome
Lawyer Jörn A. Broschat who defended Dr Grimalda in the lawsuit said:
I am pleased that the flawed decision of the first instance could be revised and that ultimately there was no reason for dismissal. Nevertheless, the legal situation remains uncertain for employees who prefer climate-neutral travel.
This case highlights the growing intersection between labor law and climate-conscious practices. It represents a milestone in the emerging discussion about the rights of employees to stand up for their climate principles as part of their professional obligations.
It is time for lawmakers and collective bargaining parties to take these beliefs more into account and enshrine them as labor rights. This is just the beginning of undoubtedly numerous labor law decisions that will address the complex interplay between climate change and the interests of employees and employers.
On Friday 17 January, the Palestine Action #Filton18 political prisoners will appear at the Old Bailey, London, to enter their pleas for the first time since their arrest.
Palestine Action: #Filton18 in court
They are expected to plead ‘not guilty’ to charges of aggravated burglary, criminal damage and, for some, violent disorder, after an August action againstIsrael’s Elbit Systems research hub in Filton, Bristol.
The action saw activists enter the site, operated by Israel’s largest weapons company, and dismantle the weapons of war inside – including the Elbit ‘quadcopter’ models used for targeted killings of children in Gaza.
Ten of the #Filton18 have been imprisoned since their arrest in August 2024, with a further eight arrested and imprisoned since November, all of them subjected to abuse of ‘Counter Terror’ powers by the British State.
The Crown Prosecution Service are alleging that the charges faced have a ‘terrorism connection’. Amnesty International has stated that the Filton case demonstrates “terrorism powers being misused” to “circumvent normal legal protections, such as justifying holding people in excessively-lengthy pre-charge detention”.
The #Filton18 political prisoners have been subjected to arbitrary and repressive treatment while inside prison – including the withholding of phone calls and mail, prohibitions on communicating with other prisoners, and denials of religious practices and medical privacy.
‘Battle-tested’
Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons company, is deeply complicit in the ongoing genocide in Gaza – providing over 85% of Israel’s armed drones, along with a wide range of munitions, armaments, and military equipment, all of which it markets internationally as having been “battle-tested” on Palestinians.
From Britain, the subsidiary ‘Elbit Systems UK’ is a major exporter to Israel of military drone components, along with arms including weapons sights. The Filton weapons hub was opened in July 2023, with Israeli Ambassador Tzipi Hotevelyin attendance praising the site for the “very best of Israeli technology”, alongside Elbit’s CEO Bezalel Machlis.
If you want to show support for the #Filton18, be at the Old Bailey, City of London, EC4M 7EH on Friday 17 January at 9:30am.
It cost the American taxpayer $24 million to find out what we knew all along: politics is corrupt.
After four years of being subjected to special prosecutor Jack Smith’s dogged investigation into alleged election interference by Donald Trump, the Justice Department has concluded that Trump would have been convicted of breaking the lawif only he hadn’t gotten re-elected.
In other words, the Deep State wins again.
The revelation here is not that Trump broke the law but the extent to which sitting presidents get a free pass when it comes to misconduct.
None of this is news.
The Deep State has been operating from this exact same playbook for decades, regardless of which party has occupied the White House.
This is how we ended up with an imperial president—empowered to act as a dictator, above the law and beyond any real accountability—and why “we the people” keep finding ourselves mired in a political swamp of lies, graft, cronyism and corruption.
George Orwell, who died 75 years ago on Jan. 21, 1950, must be rolling in his grave.
In the 75 years since George Orwell died, his works of dystopian fiction—which warn against rampant abuse of power, mind control and mass manipulation coupled with the rise of ubiquitous technology, fascism and totalitarianism—have become operation manuals for power-hungry political regimes wedded to the corporate state.
While Orwell’s novel 1984 foreshadowed the rise of an omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state, his novel Animal Farm aptly sums up the state of politics today, propped up by a two-party system designed to maintain the illusion that voting matters.
Orwell understood what many Americans, caught up in their partisan flag-waving, are still struggling to come to terms with: that there is no such thing as a government organized for the good of the people—even the best intentions among those in government inevitably give way to the desire to maintain power and control at all costs.
As Orwell explains:
The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power… We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
No doubt about it: the revolution was successful.
That January 6, 2021 attempt by President Trump and his followers to overturn the election results was not the revolution, however.
Those who answered President Trump’s call to march on the Capitol were merely the fall guys, manipulated into creating the perfect crisis for the Deep State—a.k.a. the Police State a.k.a. the Military Industrial Complex a.k.a. the Techno-Corporate State a.k.a. the Surveillance State—to amass even greater powers.
It was a set-up, folks.
The Justice Department’s policy of not prosecuting a sitting president was the tell.
The only coup d’etat to undermine the will of the people happened when our government “of the people, by the people, for the people” was overthrown by a profit-driven, militaristic, techno-corporate state that is in cahoots with a government “of the rich, by the elite, for the corporations.”
This swamp is of the Deep State’s making to such an extent that every successive president starting with Franklin D. Roosevelt has been bought lock, stock and barrel and made to dance to the Deep State’s tune.
Joe Biden was no different: his job was to keep the Deep State in power.
Trump’s return to the White House has already thrown wide the gates to all manner of swampiness.
Follow the money. It always points the way.
This brings us back to Orwell’s Animal Farm, which turns 80 this year.
Originally titled a fairy story, the satirical allegory recounts the revolutionary struggle of a group of farm animals living in squalor and neglect on a poorly run farm managed by a derelict farmer.
Hoping to create a society where all animals are equal, the farm animals mount a revolution, ejecting the farmer, taking control of the farm, establishing their own Bill of Rights, and operating under the mantra “four legs good, two legs bad.” Not surprisingly, as is the case with most revolutions, the new boss—a pig named Napoleon—turns out to be no different from their old human oppressor. Over time, a ruling class of pigs comes to dominate on the farm, which is policed by dogs, with the pigs starting to dress, walk and talk like their human counterparts. Eventually, the pigs forge an alliance with their former two-legged adversaries in order to maintain their power over the rest of the farm animals. Before long, the pigs’ transformation into two-legged overlords is complete: “they were all alike.”
“No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs,” writes Orwell. “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
Much like the gullible, easily led creatures of Animal Farm, we find ourselves being brainwashed into believing that the tyrannies meted out against us are for our own good; that the trials are tribulations we experience at the hands of the ruling elite are privileges for which we should feel grateful; and that our bondage to the Deep State is actually, appearances to the contrary, freedom.
Over time, without their realizing it, the Seven Commandments of liberation and equality that were so central to Animal Farm’s revolutionary movement are whittled down to a single commandment: “ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.”
‘In Gaza, only UNRWA has the infrastructure to distribute aid to scale, such as vehicles, warehouses, distribution centres and staff. However, Israeli authorities are making this extremely difficult,’ writes Chris Gunness.
In the last week of January, two Knesset bills ending Israel’s “cooperation” with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) are scheduled to come into force.
If they do, UNRWA’s activities in the territory of the state of Israel would be illegal under Israeli law and any Israeli official or institution engaging with the agency would be breaking the law.
In a letter to the president of the General Assembly in October, UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, revealed he had written to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, urging his government to take the necessary steps to avoid the legislation being implemented.
He also expressed concern that these laws would harm UNRWA’s ability to deliver life-saving services in Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
This provoked a detailed response from Israel’s UN Ambassador in New York, Danny Dannon, who responded laying out Israel’s strategic planning pursuant to the Knesset bills.
UNRWA to be expelled from Jerusalem Much about Israel’s strategy was already known, for example its plan to eliminate UNRWA in Gaza and deliver services through a combination of other UN agencies, such as the World Food Programme (WFP) along with the Israeli military and private sector companies.
Dannon made clear that the occupying authorities plan to take over UNRWA facilities in Jerusalem.
According to UNRWA’s website, these include 10 schools, three primary health clinics and a training centre. Students would likely be sent to Israeli schools for the Palestinian population of occupied East Jerusalem, whose curricula have been subject to “Judaisistation” in contravention of Israel’s international humanitarian law obligations to the occupied population.
There is also a major question mark over UNRWA’s massive headquarters in Sheikh Jarrah.
The UNRWA compound, which contains several huge warehouses for humanitarian goods, has been subjected to arson attacks in recent months, which forced it to shut down.
Nonetheless, it seems UNRWA’s Jerusalem HQ may be shut down in the face of Israeli threats, violence and pressure. Staff are being told to relocate to offices in Amman as a result of a performance review and UNRWA says its Jerusalem HQ was only ever temporary.
But a recent communication from UNRWA to its donors makes clear that the agency is ceding to Israeli intimidation: “While the review of HQ functions has been underway for a number of years, the review and decision has been fast-tracked as a result of the administrative and operational challenges experienced by the agency throughout 2024, including visa issuance, visa duration and lack of issuing diplomatic ID cards.
“These challenges have inhibited our effectiveness to work as a Headquarters in Jerusalem.”
De facto annexation If UNRWA is expelled from East Jerusalem, this would have potentially devastating impact on over 63,000 Palestinian refugees who depend on its services.
Moreover, it would have profound political significance, particularly for the global Islamic community because it would set the seal on Israel’s illegal annexation of Jerusalem, home to Al Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest shrine in Islam.
It would also be a violation of the ruling last July by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) demanding that the occupation ends.
The annexation of Jerusalem as the “eternal and undivided capital of the Jewish state” which began with the occupation in 1967, would become another illegal fact on the ground.
Crucially, Jerusalem will have been unilaterally removed from whatever is left of the Middle East Peace Process.
Arab governments, particularly Saudi Arabia and Jordan, must therefore act now, and decisively, to save their holy city. The loss of Jerusalem will undoubtedly provoke a violent reaction among Palestinians and likely lead to calls for jihad more widely. In the context of an explosive Middle East this can only engender further destabilising tensions for governments in the region.
I therefore call on Saudi Arabia to make the scrapping of the Knesset legislation a precondition in the normalisation negotiations with Israel. The Saudi administration must make this clear to Netanyahu and insist that for Muslims, Jerusalem is sacrosanct, and that the expulsion of UNRWA is a step too far.
The Trump transition team has already been warned of the looming catastrophe if Israel is allowed to destroy UNRWA’s operations, and I urge Arab leaders to insist with their Saudi interlocutors that the regional fallout from this feature prominently in the normalisation talks.
Lack of contingency planning Meanwhile, the senior UN leadership has adopted the position that the responsibility to deliver aid is Israel’s as the occupying power. To the consternation of UNRWA staffers, substantive inter-agency discussions across the humanitarian system about a UN-led day-after plan have effectively been banned.
For Palestinians against whom a genocide is being committed, this feels like abandonment and betrayal — a sense compounded by suspicions that UNRWA international staff may be forced to leave Gaza at a time of mass starvation.
Similar conclusions were reached by Dr Lex Takkenberg, senior advisor with Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development (ARDD), and other researchers who have just completed an as yet unpublished assessment of the implications of Israel’s ban on UNRWA, based on interviews with a large number of UNRWA staff and other experts.
Their study confirms that with the lack of contingency planning, the suffering of the Palestinian population, particularly in Gaza, will increase dramatically, as the backbone of the humanitarian operation crumbles without an alternative structure in place.
Contrary to UNRWA, Israel has been doing a great deal of contingency planning with non-UNRWA agencies such as WFP, which are under strong US pressure to take over aid imports from UNRWA. As a result, the amount of aid taken into Gaza by UNRWA has reduced significantly.
In Gaza, only UNRWA has the infrastructure to distribute aid to scale, such as vehicles, warehouses, distribution centres and staff.
However, Israeli authorities are making this extremely difficult. They claim to be “deconflicting” aid deliveries, but according to UN sources there is clear evidence that Israeli soldiers are firing on vehicles and allowing criminal gangs to plunder convoys with impunity.
Thus Israeli officials are able to say to journalists whom they have barred from seeing the truth in Gaza, that they are allowing in all the aid Gaza needs, but that UNRWA is unfit for purpose. This lie has gone unchallenged in the international media.
Further implications According to Takkenberg, “Mr Guterres’s strategy of calling on Israel as the occupying power to deliver aid has backfired and is inflicting untold suffering on the Palestinians.
“The strategy also feels misplaced, given that Israel is accused of genocide in the UN’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, and is facing expulsion from the UN General Assembly”.
He adds that Israel “has exploited the UN’s strategy as part of its campaign of starvation and genocide.”
In the face of this, I call on the Secretary-General to mobilise the UN system. He has said repeatedly that UNRWA is the backbone of the UN’s humanitarian strategy, that the agency is indispensable and key to regional stability.
It is time for the UNSG to walk the walk.
He must use his powers under Article 99 of the UN charter, granted precisely for these circumstances, to call the Security Council into emergency session and make his demand that the Knesset legislation must not be implemented the top agenda item. The General Assembly which gives UNRWA its mandate must also be called into session.
Though Guterres faces huge pressure from Israel’s powerful allies, he must stand up on behalf of a people the UN is mandated to protect and double down on those who are complicit in genocide.
The UN’s policy in Gaza along with acceptance of Jerusalem’s annexation with impunity for Israel, has major implications for its credibility and I confidently predict it will lead to further attacks by Israel on other UN agencies, such as the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which has long been an irritant to the Tel Aviv administration.
The de facto annexation of Jerusalem will also see an erosion of the international rule of law.
In its advisory opinion in July last year, the ICJ concluded that Israel is not entitled to exercise sovereign powers in any part of the Occupied Palestinian Territory on account of its occupation. In addition, the expulsion of UNRWA would be in violation of the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations, which obliges Israel as a signatory, to cooperate with UN Agencies such as UNRWA.
The UN’s historic responsibility to the Palestinians Already, through its attack on UNRWA Israel is attempting unilaterally to remove the Palestinian refugees, their history, their identity and their inalienable right of return from the peace process.
As I have argued many times, this will fail. So must Israel’s unilateral attempt to take Jerusalem off the negotiating table by expelling UNRWA and completing its illegal annexation of the city.
That would see the international community and the UN abandoning its historic responsibilities to the Palestinian people and can only lead to further suffering and instability in a chronically unstable Middle East. The Muslim world must act decisively and swiftly. The clock is ticking.
Chris Gunness served as UNRWA’s Director of Communications and Advocacy from 2007 until 2020. This article was first published in The New Arab.
Aotearoa New Zealand’s coalition government has introduced a bill to criminalise “improper conduct for or on behalf of a foreign power” or foreign interference that echoes earlier Cold War times, and could capture critics of New Zealand’s foreign and defence policy, especially if they liaise with a “foreign country”.
It is a threat to our democracy and here is why.
Two new offences are:
Offence 78AAA — a person thus charged must include all three of the following key elements — they:
know, or ought to know, they are acting for a foreign state, and
act in a covert, deceptive, coercive, or corruptive manner, and
intend to, or are aware that they are likely to, harm New Zealand interests specified in the offence through their actions OR are reckless as to whether their conduct harms New Zealand’s interests.
Offence 78AAB – a person thus charged must commit:
any imprisonable offence intending to OR being reckless as to whether doing so is likely to provide a relevant benefit to a foreign power.
New Zealand’s “interests” include its democratic processes, its economy, rights provisions, as well as its defence and security. A “Foreign Power” ranges from a foreign government to an association supporting a political party; “relevant benefit to a foreign power” includes advancing “the coercive influence of a foreign power over persons in or outside New Zealand”.
New Zealand’s “interests” include its democratic processes, its economy, rights provisions, as well as its defence and security. A “Foreign Power” ranges from a foreign government to an association supporting a political party; “relevant benefit to a foreign power” includes advancing “the coercive influence of a foreign power over persons in or outside New Zealand”.
The bill also extends laws on publication of classified information, changes “official” information to “relevant” information, increases powers of unwarranted searches by authorities, and allows charging of people outside of New Zealand who “owe allegiance to the Sovereign in right of New Zealand” and aid and abet a non-New Zealander to carry out a “relevant act” of espionage, treason and inciting to mutiny even if the act is not in fact carried out.
Why this legislation is dangerous 1. Much of the language is vague and the terms subjective. How should we establish what an individual ‘ought to have known’ or whether he or she is being “reckless”? It is entirely possible to be a loyal New Zealand and hold a different view to that of the government of the day about “New Zealand’s interests” and “security”.
This proposed legislation is potentially highly undemocratic and a threat to free speech and freedom of association. Ironically the legislation is a close copy of similar legislation passed in Australia in 2018 and it reflects the messaging about “foreign interference” promoted by our Five Eyes partners.
How should we distinguish “foreign interference” from the multitude of ways in which other states seek to influence our trade, aid, foreign affairs and defence policies? It is not plausible that the motivation behind this legislation is to limit Western pressure on New Zealand to water down its nuclear free policy.
Or to ensure that its defence forces are interoperable with those of its allies and to be part of military exercises in the South China Sea. Or to host spyware tools on behalf of the United States. Or to sign trade agreements that favour US based corporates.
The government openly supports these activities, so it seems that the legislation is aimed at foreign interference from current geostrategic “enemies”. Which ones? China, Russia, Iran?
The introduction of a bill to criminalise foreign interference has echoes of earlier Cold War times as it has the potential to criminalise members of friendship organisations that seek to improve understanding and cooperation with people in countries such as China, Russia or North Korea.
It is entirely possible that their efforts could be seen as engaging in conduct “for or on behalf of” a foreign power.
There is also real concern is that this legislation could capture critics of New Zealand’s foreign and defence policy, especially if they liaise with a “foreign country”. There is a global movement of resistance to economic sanctions on Cuba and other countries including Venezuela, and North Korea.
Supporters are likely to liaise with representatives of those countries, and perhaps circulate their material. Could that be considered harming New Zealand’s interests? The inclusion of such vague wording (Clause 78AAB) as “enhancing the influence” of a foreign power is chilling in its potential to silence open debate, and especially dissent or protest.
The legislation is unnecessary Existing law already criminalises espionage which intentionally prejudices the security or defence of New Zealand. There are also laws to cover pressurising others by blackmail, corruption, and threats of violence or threats of harm to people and property.
It is true that diaspora critics of authoritarian regimes come under pressure from their home governments. Such governments seek to silence their critics who are outside their jurisdiction by threatening harm to their families still living in the home country.
But it is not clear how New Zealand law could prevent this as it cannot protect people who are not within its jurisdiction. This is something which diaspora citizens and overseas students studying here must be acutely conscious of. This issue is one for diplomacy and negotiation rather than law.
A threat to democracy The terms sedition and subversion have gone into disuse and are no longer part of our law.
They were used in the past to criminalise some and ensure that others were subject to intrusive surveillance.
In essence both terms justified State actions against dissidents or those who held an alternative vision of how society should be ordered. In Cold War times the State was particularly exercised with those who championed communist ideas, took an interest in the Soviet Union or China or associated with Communists.
Those who associated with Soviet diplomats or attended functions at the Soviet Embassy would often be subject to SIS surveillance.
While mediator Qatar says a Gaza ceasefire deal is at the closest point it has been in the past few months — adding that many of the obstacles in the negotiations have been ironed out — a special report for Drop Site News reveals the escalation in attacks on Palestinians in Jenin in the occupied West Bank.
SPECIAL REPORT:By Mariam Barghouti in Jenin for Drop Site News
On December 28, 21-year-old Palestinian journalist Shatha Sabbagh was standing on the stairs of her home on the outskirts of the Jenin refugee camp when she was shot and killed.
The bullets weren’t fired by Israeli troops but, according to eyewitnesses and forensic evidence, by Palestinian Authority security forces.
The Palestinian Authority has been conducting a large-scale military operation in Jenin since early December, dubbing it “Operation Homeland Protection”.
A stronghold of Palestinian armed resistance in the occupied West Bank, the city of Jenin and the refugee camp within it have been repeatedly raided, bombed, and besieged by the Israeli military in an attempt to crush the Jenin Brigade — a politically diverse militant group of mostly third-generation refugees who believe armed resistance is key to liberating Palestinian lands from Israeli occupation and annexation.
Over the past 15 months, the Israeli military has killed at least 225 Palestinians in Jenin, making it the deadliest area in the West Bank.
The real aim, residents say, is to crush Palestinian armed resistance at the behest of Israel. Dubbed the “Wasps’ Nest” by Israeli officials, Jenin refugee camp has posed a constant threat to Israel’s settler colonial project.
But the current operation, which is being billed as a campaign to “restore law and order,” is the longest and most lethal assault by Palestinian security forces in recent memory. While the PA claims to be rooting out armed factions and individuals accused of being “Iranian-backed outlaws,” according to multiple residents and eyewitnesses, the operation is a suffocating siege, with indiscriminate violence, mass arrests, and collective punishment.
Sixteen Palestinians have been killed so far, with security forces setting up checkpoints around the city and refugee camp, cutting electricity to the area, and engaging in fierce gun battles. Among those killed are six members of the security forces and one resistance fighter, Yazeed Ja’aysa.
Yet the overwhelming majority of those killed have been civilians, including Sabbagh, and at least three children — Majd Zeidan, 16, Qasm Hajj, 14, and Mohammad Al-Amer, 13.
“It’s reached levels I have never seen before. Even journalists aren’t allowed to cover it,” M., 24, a local journalist and resident of Jenin, told Drop Site News on condition of anonymity for fear of being arrested or targeted by PA security forces.
Dozens of residents, including journalists, have been arrested from Jenin and across the West Bank by the PA in the past six weeks under the pretext of supporting the so-called Iranian-backed “outlaws.”
PA security forces spokesperson Brigadier-General Anwar Rajab has justified the assault as “in response to the supreme national interest of the Palestinian people, and within the framework of ongoing continued efforts to maintain security and civil peace, establish the rule of law, and eradicate sedition and chaos”.
‘Wasps’ Nest’ threat to Israel’s settler colonial project
But the real aim, residents say, is to crush Palestinian armed resistance at the behest of Israel. Dubbed the “Wasps’ Nest” by Israeli officials, Jenin refugee camp has posed a constant threat to Israel’s settler colonial project.
Just one week into the operation, on December 12, PA security forces shot and killed the first civilian, 19-year-old Ribhi Shalabi, and injured his 15-year-old brother in the head. Although the PA initially denied killing Shalabi and claimed he was targeting its security forces with IEDs, video captured by CCTV shows Ribhi being shot execution-style while riding his Vespa.
The PA later admitted to killing Shalabi, saying “the Palestinian National Authority bears full responsibility for his martyrdom, and announces that it is committed to dealing with the repercussions of the incident in a manner consistent with and in accordance with the law, ensuring justice and respect for rights”.
Just two days later, the PA began escalating their attack on Jenin. At approximately 5:00 am on December 14, the Palestinian Authority officially declared the large-scale operation, dubbing it “Himayat Watan” or “Homeland Protection.”
By 8:00 am, Jenin refugee camp was under siege and two more Palestinians had been killed, including prominent Palestinian resistance fighter Yazeed Ja’aisa, and 13-year-old Mohammad Al-Amer. At least two other children were injured with live ammunition.
The roads leading to Jenin are now riddled with Israeli checkpoints while the entrance to the city is surrounded by PA armoured vehicles and security forces brandishing assault rifles, their faces hidden behind black balaclavas.
Eerily reminiscent of past Israeli incursions, snipers fire continuously from within the PA security headquarters toward the refugee camp just to the west, sending the sound of live ammunition echoing through the city. The PA also imposed a curfew on the city of Jenin, warning residents that anyone moving in the streets would be shot.
PA counterterrorism units have also been stationed at the entrance to Jenin’s public hospital, while the National Guard blocked roads with armoured vehicles and personnel carriers, denying entry to journalists.
When I attempted to reach the hospital on December 14 with another journalist to gather information for Drop Site on the injuries sustained during the earlier firefight and follow up on the killing of Al-Amer, the 13-year-old, armed and masked PA security forces claimed the area was a closed security zone. When we attempted to carry out field interviews outside the camp instead, two armed men in civilian clothing who identified themselves as members of the mukhabarat — Palestinian General Intelligence — requested that we leave the area.
“If you stay here, you might get shot by the outlaws,” he warned. Yet, from where we stood between the hospital, the PA security headquarters, and Jenin refugee camp, the only bullets being fired were coming from the direction of the PA headquarters towards the camp.
PA security forces also appear to have been using one of the hospital wards as a makeshift detention center where detainees are being mistreated. While Brigadier-General Rajab, the PA’s spokesperson, denied this; several young men detained by the PA told Drop Site they were taken to the third floor of Jenin public hospital where they were interrogated and beaten.
“They kept asking me about the fighters,” said A., a 31-year-old medical service provider from Jenin refugee camp, who says he was held for hours, blindfolded, and denied legal representation.
“They kept beating me, cursing at me, asking me questions that I don’t have answers for.”
Fear of being arrested, abused again
Since his arbitrary detention, A. has not returned to work out of fear of being arrested and abused again.
According to residents, the PA also stationed snipers in the hospital, firing at the camp from inside the facility. During the past six weeks, according to interviews with several medics in Jenin, PA security forces shot at medics, burned two medical vehicles, beat paramedics, and detained medical workers throughout the siege.
“What exactly are they protecting?” Abu Yasir, 50, asks as he stands outside the hospital, waiting for any news of the security operation to end.
A father of three, Abu Yasir grew up in the Jenin refugee camp. “There are people being killed in the camp just for being there. They didn’t do anything,” he told Drop Site as he burst into tears.
By December 14, with Operation Homeland Protection entering its 10th day, families in the refugee camp had run out of food, the chronically ill needed life-saving medication, and with electricity and water punitively cut from the camp, families found themselves under siege and increasingly desperate.
Women and their children tried to protest in an attempt to break the PA-imposed blockade. They also wanted to challenge the PA’s claim of targeting outlaws. As the women gathered in the dark towards the edge of the camp, several men worked to fix an electricity box to restore power to the camp.
When the lights came on, cheers echoed in the camp — but barely 15 minutes later, PA forces shot at the box, plunging the area into darkness again.
Denying electricity for families
According to residents of the camp, over the course of 10 days, the PA shot at the electric power boxes more than a dozen times, denying families electricity just as temperatures began to plummet.
Elderly women confronted soldiers of the Special Administrative Tasks squad (SAT), a specialised branch of the PA security forces, SAT is trained by the Office of the United States Security Coordinator (USSC) and is responsible for coordinating operations with the United States and Israel, including joint-operations and intelligence sharing.
“I yelled at them,” said Umm Salamah, 62. “They burst through the door, and at first, I thought they were Israelis’” she told Drop Site, pointing to the destroyed door. “I told them I have children in the house. But they forced their way in.
“I told them we already have the Israeli army constantly raiding us, and now you?”
Not only were homes raided, according to Umm Salameh, but PA security forces also fired at water tanks, effectively cutting water supplies to the camp. Jenin refugee camp had already been severely damaged in the last Israeli invasion, during which Israeli military and border-police bulldozed the city’s civilian infrastructure, turning streets into hills of rubble.
Operation Homeland Protection comes just three months following “Operation Summer Camps,” Israel’s large-scale military operation between August and October.
Under the pretext of targeting “Iran-backed terrorists,” Israeli forces destroyed large swathes of civilian infrastructure in the northern districts of the West Bank, namely Jenin, Tulkarem, Nablus and Tubas, and killed more than 150 Palestinians over three months, a fifth of whom were children.
Protest over ‘outlaws’ framing
Outside in the mud-filled streets, the group of women began to chant “Kateebeh!” (Brigade) in support of the Jenin Brigade, and in protest of the PA’s attempt to frame them as “outlaws” and a “threat to national security.”
Within minutes, the SAT unit responded with teargas and stun grenades fired directly at the crowd, which included journalists clearly marked with fluorescent PRESS insignia. While elderly women tripped and fell to the ground, children ran back towards the camp as PA security forces kept lobbing stun grenades at the fleeing crowd.
In an interview with Drop Site that evening, Brigadier-General Rajab affirmed that “this operation comes to achieve its goals which are the reclaiming of safety and security of Palestinians and reclaiming Jenin refugee camp from the outlaws that kidnapped it and spread corruption in it while threatening the lives of civilians.”
Days later, the PA had expanded its operations to Tulkarem, where clashes between resistance fighters and PA security forces erupted on December 19. This came just one day following an Israeli airstrike which killed three Palestinian fighters in Tulkarem refugee camp: Dusam Al-Oufi, Mohammad Al-Oufi, and Mohammad Rahayma.
On December 22, Saher Irheil, a Palestinian officer in the PA’s presidential guard was killed in Jenin, and two others injured.
According to official state media and statements by the PA, Lieutenant Irheil was killed by the “outlaws” of Jenin refugee camp. Brigadier-General Rajab claimed “this heinous crime will only increase [the PA’s] determination to pursue those outside the law and impose the rule of law, in order to preserve the security and safety of our people.”
By military order, speakers from mosques across the West Bank echoed in a public tribute to the fallen officer. The same was not done for those killed by the PA, including Shalabi, the 19-year-old whom the PA dubbed “a martyr of the nation” after being forced to admit they killed him.
That week, PA security forces escalated their attack on the Jenin refugee camp, using rocket-propelled grenades and firing indiscriminately at families sheltering in their own homes. PA security officers even posted photos and videos of themselves online, similar to those taken by Israeli soldiers while invading the camp in August and September.
On December 23, security forces shot and killed 16-year-old Majd Zeidan while he was returning to his home from a nearby corner store. The PA claimed Zeidan was an Iranian-backed saboteur.
Killed teenager had bag of chips
“They killed him, then said he was a 26-year-old Iranian-backed outlaw,” Zeidan’s mother, Yusra, told Drop Site. “Look,” she said while pulling her son’s ID card from her pocket. “My son was 16 years old, killed while returning from the store with a bag of chips.”
According to Yusra, not only was her son killed, but her brother who lives in Nablus, was arrested by the PA a few days later for holding a wake for his slain nephew.
“The Preventative Security are detaining my brother because he was mourning a mukhareb,” she said. The term “mukhareb” which roughly translates to “saboteur” is a term derived from the Israeli term “mekhablim” which is commonly used when arresting Palestinians.
The funeral of journalist Shatha Sabbagh who was shot and killed on December 28 in Jenin. The journalist carrying her body the next day on the left (Jarrah Khallaf) was later arrested by the PA. Image: The photographer chose to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal by the PA/Drop Site News
A few days later, on December 28, Shatha Sabbagh, a young journalist, was shot and killed as she stood on the stairs of her home at the edges of the camp. Official PA statements claim that Sabbagh was killed by resistance fighters, not its security forces.
However, accounts by eyewitnesses and the victim’s family belie those claims.
According to testimonies from her family and residents, Sabbagh was killed while holding her 18-month-old nephew; her sister lives nearby, on Mahyoub Street in the refugee camp — the same area PA snipers were targeting. Initial autopsy findings shared with Drop Site show that the bullet that struck her came from the area in which PA snipers were positioned in the camp.
Known for her reliable reporting during both Israeli and PA raids on Jenin, local residents claim that PA loyalists had been inciting against Sabbagh for some time. Further inflaming tensions, Sabbagh’s killing underscored the risks faced by Palestinian journalists in documenting what the PA would rather conceal.
Soon afterward, Brigadier-General Rajab spoke about the killing of Sabbagh in a live interview with Al Jazeera. He turned off his camera and left the interview, however, as soon as Sabbagh’s mother was brought on air. Sabbagh’s mother, Umm Al-Mutasem, was next to her daughter when she was killed.
On January 5, the Magistrate Court of Ramallah announced a suspension of Al Jazeera’s broadcasting operations in the West Bank, citing a “failure to meet regulations.” This move followed Israel’s closure of Al Jazeera offices during Operation Summer Camps in September of last year.
100 Palestinians arrested in operation
The Preventative Security, an internal intelligence organisation led by the Minister of Interior, and part of the Palestinian Security Services, arrested more than a hundred Palestinians as part of Operation Homeland Protection, including five journalists in Nablus and Jenin. Palestinians were summoned and interrogated, at times tortured, and detained without legal representation.
The PA not only targeted residents of the camp, but also expanded its repressive campaign to target anyone that would sympathise with the camp or is suspected of having any solidarity with the armed resistance.
Amro Shami, 22, who was arrested by the PA from his home in Jenin on December 25 had markings of torture on his body during his court hearing in the Nablus Court the following day. Shami was reported to have bruising on his body and was unable to lift his arms in court.
Despite appeals by his lawyer, the court denied Amro release on bail. Amro’s lawyer was only able to visit 15 days later when he reported additional torture against Amro, including breaking his leg.
An armed resistance fighter of the Jenin Brigade in Jenin refugee camp last month. Image: The photographer chose to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal by the PA/Drop Site News
At the very end of December, as the operation stretched into its fifth week, journalists were able to enter the camp at their own risk. With water and electricity cut off, families huddled outside, burning wood and paper in old metal barrels to try and keep warm.
The camp reeked with uncollected trash piled in the alleyways due to the PA cutting all social services from the camp.
Inside the camp, armed resistance fighters patrolled the streets. After confirming our IDs as journalists they helped us move safely in the dark.
“In the beginning there were clashes between the Brigade and the PA, but we told them we are willing to collaborate with anything that does not harm the community,” H., a 26-year-old fighter with the brigade, told Drop Site. The young fighter was referring to the PA’s claims that they are targeting “outlaws”, in which the Jenin Brigade agreed to hand over anyone that is indeed breaking the law.
However, the PA seemed more interested in the resistance fighters.
Spokesmen of the Jenin Brigade have made several public statements informing the PA that as long as the operation was not targeting resistance efforts, they would fully comply and coordinate to ensure law and order.
‘We are with the law . . . but which law?’
“We are with the law, we are not outside the law. We are with the enforcement of law, but which law? When an Israeli jeep comes into Jenin to kill me, where are you as law enforcement?”
Abu Issam, a spokesman for the Jenin Brigade told Drop Site: “As I speak right now, the PA armoured vehicles and jeeps are parked over our planted IEDs, and we are not detonating them,” he said.
A former member of the PA presidential guard, Abu Issam is no stranger to the PA’s repressive tactics to quell resistance.
“Our compass is clear, it’s against the occupation,” he said. “Come protect us from the Israeli settlers, and by all means here is my gun as a gift. Get them out of our lands, and execute me.
“We were surprised with the demands of the PA. They offered us three choices: to turn ourselves in along with our weapons, offering us jobs for amnesty; to leave the camp and allow the PA to take over; or to confront them.
“We have no choice but to confront,” he says, holding his M16 to his chest. “We want a dignified life, a free life, not a life of security coordination with our oppressors,” H. said.
By the second week of January, not only did the PA expand its security operations to Tulkarem and Tubas, but intensified its violence against Palestinians in Jenin refugee camp as well.
On January 3, PA snipers shot and killed 43-year-old Mahmoud Al-Jaqlamousi and his 14-year-son, Qasm, as they were gathering water. Two days later, PA security forces began burning homes of residents near the Ghubz quarter of the camp.
“Why burn it? I didn’t build this home in an hour, it was years of work, why burn it?” Issam Abu Ameira asks while standing in front of the charred walls of his home.
The operation, ostensibly intended to restore security and order, has instead brought devastation, raising troubling questions about governance and resistance in the West Bank.
“This is not solely the PA. This is also the United States and Israel’s attempt to crush resistance in the West Bank,” H. said. Like him, other fighters find the timing of the operation to be questionable.
“This is an organisation that negotiated with the occupation for more than 30 years, but can’t sit and talk with the Jenin refugee camp for 30 hours?” Abu Al-Nathmi, a spokesperson for the Jenin Brigade, said as he huddled inside the camp while fighters patrolled around us and live ammunition fired continuously in the area.
‘PA acting like group of gangs’
“The PA is acting like a group of gangs, each trying to prove their power and dominance at the expense of Jenin refugee camp,” Abu Al-Nathmi tells Drop Site. “Right now the PA is trying to prove itself to the United States to take over Gaza, but there was no position taken to defend Gaza.”
While the PA continued its attack on Jenin refugee camp, the Israeli military waged military operations on the neighboring villages of Jenin, as well as Tubas and Tulkarem where 11 Palestinians were killed in the first week of January, three of whom were children.
In the 39 days since the PA launched Operation Homeland Protection, more than 40 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military in the West Bank, including six children. Over that same time period, Israeli courts have issued confiscation orders for thousands of hectares of land belonging to Palestinians in the West Bank.
The PA is failing to provide protection to the Palestinian people against continuous settler expansion and amid an ongoing genocide in Gaza, residents of the Jenin refugee camp say.
“The PA is claiming they don’t want what happened to Gaza to happen here, but here we are dying a hundred times,” Abu Amjad, 50, told Drop Site. Huddled near a fire outside the rubble of his home, he cries “we are being humiliated, attacked, beaten, and told there’s nothing we can do about it. In this way, it’s better to die.”
Mariam Barghouti is a writer and a journalist based in the West Bank. She is a member of the Marie Colvin Journalist Network. This article was first published by Drop News.
Environmental charities including the RSPB and the Environmental Rights Centre for Scotland (ERCS) have called out the Scottish government’s ‘abject failure’ to meet the access to justice requirements of the UN Aarhus Convention.
Scottish government is failing over access to justice
In 2021, the Convention’s compliance committee gave Scotland six recommendations to remove barriers that are preventing people from taking environmental cases to court. The UK’s final progress report confirms none of the recommendations have been met and it remains ‘prohibitively expensive’ to access justice.
Scotland, as part of the UK, is a signatory to the Aarhus Convention, a UN treaty that guarantees people’s rights to access information, participate in decision-making and access justice in environmental matters.
Following the most recent ruling of non-compliance by the Convention’s governing bodies in 2021, the Scottish government was required to make access to justice affordable, reform time limits for judicial review and reform planning permissions by the deadline of 1 October 2024.
Yet the UK’s Final Progress Report to the Aarhus Convention Compliance Committee (ACCC) confirmed that Scotland has made only minor modifications to legal expenses and no concrete commitments for future reform.
Comments on the UK report, submitted jointly by the RSPB, ERCS and Friends of the Earth England, Wales and Northern Ireland, have been scathing in their assessment of government action to date, with signatories remarking that they are ‘deeply concerned and frustrated that, as a whole, the UK has failed to make any tangible progress’.
Access to justice remains unaffordable for two main reasons.
First, it is incredibly difficult to access legal aid for environmental cases.
Second, the ‘loser pays’ rule means that litigants are liable to pay their opponents fees if they lose their case which can cost tens of thousands of pounds.
The ACCC has clearly stated that this causes a ‘chilling effect’ – deterring individuals and organisations taking legal action, even if they have a strong case to do so.
Shivali Fifield, Chief Officer at ERCS, said:
Upholding our environmental rights in court is the ultimate guarantee of the rule of law. Without this credible threat, polluters can act with impunity.
Scotland, as part of the UK, has been a signatory to the Aarhus Convention for nearly two decades, but despite repeated warnings from legal experts and campaigners, it has a record of abject failure when it comes to delivering the reforms needed to guarantee access to justice for environmental cases. After years of broken promises, it would be easy to think that the government is threatened by adhering to international law and making access to justice affordable. If they truly believe in community empowerment and a just transition to net zero, they must make our legal system work for people and planet.
Aedán Smith, Head of Policy & Advocacy at RSPB Scotland, said:
Scotland is one of the most nature depleted countries in the world and we are continuing to lose nature, with 1 in 9 species at risk of national extinction. Yet, despite welcome progress to improve some legal protections for nature over recent years, it remains extremely difficult for individuals and community groups to challenge poor decisions. The Scottish Government must urgently address this to ensure the laws it has introduced can be implemented effectively and as intended.
Belgian Lebanese activist Dyab Abou Jahjah, the founder of the Hind Rajab Foundation, discusses how the organization seeks to hold Israeli soldiers accountable for war crimes committed in Gaza. Named after a 6-year-old girl who was killed by Israeli forces in Gaza almost a year ago, the Hind Rajab Foundation uses evidence gathered from soldiers’ own social media to build cases against them. The group recently filed a complaint against a soldier in Brazil, leading a local judge to issue an arrest warrant for him that he only avoided by fleeing to Argentina. “Unfortunately, the Israeli government smuggled the soldier out of Brazil, which is, of course, obstructing justice,” Abou Jahjah tells Democracy Now! “We are relentless in seeking justice, and we are very convinced that one day justice also will be served in a court of law.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Belgian Lebanese activist Dyab Abou Jahjah, the founder of the Hind Rajab Foundation, discusses how the organization seeks to hold Israeli soldiers accountable for war crimes committed in Gaza. Named after a 6-year-old girl who was killed by Israeli forces in Gaza almost a year ago, the Hind Rajab Foundation uses evidence gathered from soldiers’ own social media to build cases against them. The group recently filed a complaint against a soldier in Brazil, leading a local judge to issue an arrest warrant for him that he only avoided by fleeing to Argentina. “Unfortunately, the Israeli government smuggled the soldier out of Brazil, which is, of course, obstructing justice,” Abou Jahjah tells Democracy Now! “We are relentless in seeking justice, and we are very convinced that one day justice also will be served in a court of law.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! Audio and was authored by Democracy Now!.
A vigil to mark unjustly imprisoned Just Stop Oil activist Gaie Delap’s 78th birthday was held outside Eastwood Park Prison on Friday 10th January. It came after she was sent back to prison – despite having served her sentence – because of failures of the criminal justice system.
Gaie Delap: an outrage and injustice
The vigil for Gaie a peaceful and dignified Quaker-led occasion accompanied by family and friends:
It is now three weeks since Gaie was arrested and returned to prison following systemic failings in the management of her home detention curfew. These include evidence of deceit on the part of Serco EMS who manage tagging arrangements on behalf of the Ministry of Justice (see our New Year’s statement).
Gaie’s brother, Mick, who visited her last Friday said:
Despite her outrage, tempered with resignation, she tries to stay strong. She knows about the vigil. She is overwhelmed with the messages of support she has received. The best birthday present for her would be that common sense and justice prevail and lead to her re-release.
Lily Pridie, her daughter, had this message for her mother:
Please stay strong and keep your spirits up. We are so proud of you. Thousands of people are supporting you. Let’s hope that something positive comes out as a result of this awful situation.
One of the organisers of the vigil Jo Flanagan said:
The vigil will be supported by dozens of singers from the Climate Choir Movement which started in Bristol. Several of the organisers of this movement are Quakers and know Gaie personally and attend the same Quaker Meeting House in Bristol including the two co- founders. Many of the principles on which the choir it is founded align with Quaker values including peacefully singing ‘truth to power’ and standing up against injustice.
Close friend Mike Campbell added:
Gaie makes it clear too that this is not just about her situation. There are other countless women who are impacted by tagging failures. She told us about a woman released late and then recalled because there was no available bus to get home in time for their curfew. She also witnesses daily the impact of imprisonment on other women, those with mental health problems, addiction issues, mothers separated from their children. Like Gaie, these are women who should not be in prison.
Another birthday present for Gaie arrived early. This was in the form of a song called Eastwood Park Blues, written and performed by the Blue House Buoys, with a call to Shabana Mahmood, the Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Timpson, Prisons Minister to ‘free Gaie Delap’. “Dearest Gaie, we shower you with love”, said a spokesperson for group.
‘You should not be in prison on your birthday’
Carla Denyer, Green MP for Bristol Central, said “My heart goes out to Gaie who is spending her 78th birthday behind bars – all because the private company responsible for fitting electronic tags couldn’t find one the right size for her. I know her friends and family are desperate to see her come home. Gaie has not broken bail conditions, neither is she a threat to the public. I find it beyond belief that a solution cannot be found to get Gaie home”:
As Gaie’s MP I have tried everything I can to challenge the decision to send her back to prison – including writing to the prisons minister Lord Timpson and the probation service – and I will continue to push for her release.
Hannah Greer, of the Good Law Project who are crowdfunding for Gaie’s legal fees, said:
You should not be in prison on your birthday. On behalf of the hundreds of supporters whose generosity has so far raised over £20,000 you have our continued support and we send birthday greetings.
Melanie Jameson from Quakers in Criminal Justice who are upholding Gaie on her birthday said “With prisons overflowing, this is no place for peaceful climate protesters. In Gaie’s case, we are appalled that Serco’s failings have led to her recall”.
